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Broadcasting from deep in the heart of the American Empire, join your hosts Harrison Koehli and Elan Martin, 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 continue their discussion of the UK pedophile politician scandal, looking at other cases and current events.

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: 01:58:00

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Here's the transcript of the show:


Harrison: Welcome back to the Truth Perspective. It's August 1st. We're going to be continuing our discussion from last week on the UK pedophile scandal and get into some other topics as well. I'm Harrison Koehli. With me is my co-host Elan Martin.

Elan: Hi everyone.

Harrison: And SOTT editor Shane Lachance.

Shane: Hi everybody.

Harrison: So we're just going to get right into it. We're running behind on time already. What's the latest on this story Elan?

Elan: Well recently we had an investigation into Kincora Boys' Home which was a youth hostel for boys in northern Belfast, Ireland which is pointing to a lot of high end government complicity, obfuscations, lies, into the abuse for decades of boys who came from troubled homes and were sent to this boy's' home to stay. It goes into a few different directions that all have pretty strong implications and leads that go directly back to the elite politicians, movers and shakers of the UK.

There was an investigation that was started. It was headed by an individual who was a former judge, Sir Anthony Hart. This is part of the historical abuse enquiry. It was suggested by Amnesty International that investigation be made into the Kincora home precisely because it leads back to yet another horrific paedophilia ring or maybe part of the same one; we're just seeing another piece of the elephant here. More information is coming out about it.

What we do know so far is that one of the individuals who was being investigated some time back was William McGrath. He elevated the level of abuse at the Kincora home to connect it to British politicians where before it was just to individuals who were running the home, Brendan Smith and another individual.

When it was investigated recently, it turned out that a Mark Sedwill, who was a top civil servant in the Home Office, really blocked the investigation. He first said that whatever documentation they had, had only been kept for two years and then thrown away. And then when asked who was in charge of the original documentation, blatantly refused to say, not wanting to implicate anyone.

There's a lot of information that this William McGrath connected these boys to the politicians who abused them. He was part of something called the Orange Union or the Orange Order. This is one of these protestant holier-than-thou organizations that's loyal to England basically. So there's a political connection there. They also have Masonic leanings. So does the Orange Order have some kind of Masonic secret society, inner circle that protects people who are committing these types of crimes? Are they all connected? These are some of the questions that come to mind when you hear that he was so closely affiliated to this group and wore it as a political badge of protection because they tout themselves as the righteously honourable group.

So you had that connection as well. There have been six enquiries previously into the Kincora scandal, none of which got anywhere near the kind of truth that this new investigation may lead us to. That's essentially it. It would be interesting to see where this goes. In reading about this I was once again, flabbergasted about this connection between political elites who have a connection to abuse. What is it in their makeup that compels them to be connected to this type of behaviour?

There were stories around the Kincora case that concerned protection by MI5, England's elite, the equivalent of the CIA or Mossad in Israel and why were they protecting McGrath at some point earlier on in the investigations as well? Part of the story, as it goes, is that all of these individuals who were involved in these systemic abuses are being setup for blackmail at a later time in order to do certain things that other people in elite circles would have them do. They have to know by now that they're being watched by other people in intelligence.

So I don't know where their heads are. Maybe it's some kind of compulsion to behave in this way. But the only thing I can think of is that these guys are completely psychopathic. There's some kind of dark thrill that satisfies their desire to abuse people and enjoy doing what they do with no real risk of being found out.

Shane: One of the stories that we were talking about last week was the MI5 disclosure about some of the things that were happening with these paedophile rings and started to discuss these things that you mentioned Elan, about how these organizations will have these parties and they'll record what's going on and basically have this dirt that they'll use on these politicians and powerful people. One of the things I was wondering is are some of these stories that we're seeing evidence of these power plays being made? It may in part be that this disease is so massive and widespread it's just like this cockroach infestation where there's so many of them that you're just going to see them in the daylight, there's so many.
But it could also be that some of these things are being leaked as a part of these manoeuvres to say "Hey, we have this on you. Go in this direction." I'm sure there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes.

Harrison: You know I'd never thought about it that way. I'll get into another story about this, the blackmail aspect, but like you said last week, we talked about the MI5 story about how this one guy had told someone else involved in these types of investigations - I think it was in the '80s - that the security risk didn't outweigh the potential for embarrassment for the people involved, which was just the most slimeball thing that he could say about it and the way to approach this issue.

But then I read a couple of other articles about it, bringing in the MI5 angle as the blackmail angle so that MI5 probably actually had more of a hand in this in the sense that they themselves were involved by using these facts on these individuals they had on them as blackmail. I've been thinking about this story for a while and just how much play it's been getting in the news and that's struck me as being a little bit weird because these kinds of stories have come up numerous times in the past in various country and when we look at what happened with all of those other stories, they were just totally whitewashed and covered up.

Now of course I wasn't alive or reading the news when some of these stories were happening so I don't know what the media coverage was like at the time, if it anywhere approached this level. For example with the Franklin scandal or the Dutroux scandal in the Netherlands and France, as well as other stories in Portugal and other countries where this same kind of thing was going on. So I've been asking myself "Why has there been so much press? Could this potentially go in a different direction? Could something substantial be exposed whereas in the past it has always been covered up?"

I don't really hold out any hope just going by past experiences of this and the record of cover up every time it happens and it's never fully exposed. But I've never considered the way that you've framed it Shane where "Could the scandal being played out right now be this aspect of the blackmail?" Because we always hear about this blackmail stuff going on, but if it's being used as blackmail you'd think that every once in awhile people don't go along with it and actually get exposed but we don't actually hear about that. We have these kind of vanilla sex scandals that do come out about people cheating on their wives or something like that, but nothing that approaches the level of depravity and just grossness of what's actually going on.

So maybe there is something going on behind the scenes and this is the blackmail being played out. They're running the investigations, they're looking into it, and all the while the people involved are like "Okay, I know that they're going to cover up for me. They're going to cover it up because I'm part of the team" or whatever, but who knows? Maybe there are some of them that are like "What does this mean? Am I the guy that's going to be the scapegoat for this entire organization and this entire thing that's going on?" I don't know. That would be pretty interesting. Even if it is the result of blackmail, they deserve it so I hope something happens.

We talked about the Australian 60 Minutes that came out a couple of weeks ago and they interviewed a few of the child victims, who are adults now, of these people. Richard Kerr from Kincora House, who was trafficked from Northern Ireland to London to sell them and use them as sex slaves for these guys. So he tells a bunch about what happened. It's just a really sad story. We've got articles and interviews with him on SOTT.
But what I want to get into is a historical precedent of this that was probably going on at the same time actually. This was a contemporaneous event to all of these events that are coming up now, so '70s and '80s and as I mentioned last week that's the Franklin scandal of course but there's another angle to that story that we haven't really gotten into and that is the Washington, DC sex scandal that was going on at the time.

So of course Nick Bryant wrote the book The Franklin Scandal which we've recommended numerous times, but earlier this year he also co-wrote a book Confessions of a DC Madam-the Politics of Sex, Lies and Blackmail. This was written by Henry W. Vincent with Nick Bryant and this book touches on, to a large degree, the Washington, DC angle. With the Franklin scandal there was of course the Franklin scandal dealing with Larry King and the paedophile murder ring that was operating out of Boys Town and using the boys in Boys Town and numerous others.

But there was a connection with DC in the sense that Larry King was friends with this guy Craig Spence and I'll get to him in a minute. The book is written by Henry Vincent and he was the madam. He headed the largest DC escort service that catered to all these people, a bunch of individuals including people in business and politics, the upper echelon of DC society. I'll just give a bit of background because the story itself is interesting. The book is kind of an autobiography/memoir of Vincent, telling the story of where he came from.

It starts with his childhood all the way up to the present day. So all these events formed who he was and how he came to be this DC madam because hearing the story about this guy that runs this escort service and then gets caught up in this giant scandal going as high as the White House, it got me thinking "Well how does that happen? Who is this guy and how do you get to be the head of this big escort service in DC that gets involved with all these important people?" So I'd recommend the book. It's well written and it tells the story and there's a lot of juicy details in there.

But just to give a bit of the background on how it happened, Henry Vincent was a mortician in a small town, not Washington, DC and a bunch of stuff happened - just to make the story short - and he moved to DC. He was gay and so finally moving out of this small town in West Virginia, going to the big city he was able to escape the anti-gay attitudes where he didn't really find a lot of acceptance or even the ability to be open about his sexuality. So he went to DC and of course there's all kinds of stuff going on. So he met guys that turned out to be escorts and one these guys that he went on a date with put him onto this other guy who was dying of AIDS and was selling his escort service.

So after thinking it over for awhile, he decided "Okay, it's available for a good price and look, they're in the Yellow Pages. It's a semi-legitimate business. I can make a lot of money out of this." So he bought it. The reason that he became so successful I think was that he showed a real business acumen in the escort business. For example there were a ton of entries for escort services in the DC Yellow Pages and other kinds of resources for companies like that. A lot of them would just be these little fly-by-night routines where they'd open up and then they might get shut down later on so they'd have unpaid bills for their phones, or ads that are still going but that aren't applicable in the Yellow Pages.

So what he'd do is call up the phone company and offer to pay the old bills for these phone numbers if he could get hold of the phone numbers. He gained possession of dozens of numbers for all these phoney escort services in the Yellow Pages so the number of calls that he'd get every day would just increase. He had to get one of those special phones with 100 different lines and phone numbers on it to be able to field all these calls. So he started his business while working as a funeral home director and managed to fall into being the head of the largest DC male or gay escort service.

While doing this of course he got a lot of clients and being DC, a lot of these clients were top politicians or people involved in administrations or cabinets or whatever. In the book he describes the story leading up to this and how it was this process of running this escort service that put him in contact with all these people as his clients. He does name a few names in the book. The only people that he does name are either people who have already been exposed from their own sex scandals or who are dead. There are many that he doesn't name because he no longer is in possession of any of his records from the time that he was running his escort service because in the trial against him all of those records were taken away. So he doesn't have any of the proof that he used to have.

That's a whole other story because he was put in jail for years. He was put on trial and they got him on the charge of conspiring to do stuff and being part of this massive conspiracy in credit card fraud. So he was punished, but they wouldn't allow any of the names to come out and none of the actual johns, the people involved in this, were named or punished for being involved with any of this. It is reminiscent of the Franklin scandal where the people who are actually deeply involved in this in the shadier aspects just got off scot-free.

The biggest name that he named was CIA director William Casey.

Elan: Keep that name in mind folks. We're going to talk about him a little later in a different context.

Harrison: On one of the pages he says "I felt a potential risk to my life with CIA director William Casey's patronage of my escort service." The Washington Times, who actually did a half decent reporting job on this whole story when it happened, and then Washington Post came in and with typically Washington Post journalism, made a total whitewash of it, covered it up and said "Oh none of that stuff is true. We talked to people and they say everything's fine. Nothing's going on". Which was all lies.

But William Casey frequently attended parties at this guy Craig Spence's house. As Vincent's running this escort service he finds out that he's been getting this return client, this guy Craig Spence, who's been spending $20,000 a month on escorts. So he was asking his escorts "What's the deal with this guy? Who is he?" And they said it was okay but he was into really weird stuff, like really weird stuff. Sometimes there'd be parties and a bunch of people. I won't get into the details, but it turned out that Spence ended taking control of Vincent and telling him that he owned him and making sure that he did things exactly as Spence wanted him to.

So he, through his own machinations, took over in a sense, and controlled the way Vincent should do this. And the way he did that was because Spence was the guy running a similar blackmail operation to what we are probably seeing in the UK. So he'd hire all these escorts and he'd have important people over for parties at his house or just individual rendezvous and his whole place was wired with tape recorders, video recorders behind one-way mirrors. So he had all this dirt on people and he told Vincent right up front this was what he was doing. "Oh, I use this for blackmailing people". And the reason that he could just come out and say that was that first of all, just from the description of this guy, he was a total psychopath. He was a total megalomaniac. He thought he was god's gift to the universe and the world revolved around him and he could do anything and he was just that powerful.

In a sense he was pretty powerful for a while at least. Vincent says he had pictures of himself with Ronald Reagan and Bob Hope along with numerous other people. He met with people regularly from military and business. So Spence was the guy that was friends with Larry King. Vincent had met Larry King at Spence's house so there was a connection right there. And this was a conversation that the three of them had together. Spence revealed to Vincent after the conversation - so this was after Vincent had told him his whole life story and that he was involved with the escort service - he told Vincent "Well I've just been recording the conversation". He showed him the gear that was behind this large mirror in the office. And during this conversation King had talked about the paedophile ring that he was running with Spence that involved the rape and torture, trafficking and murder of children.

At the time Vincent thought that these guys were crazy and one-upping themselves with how evil they were and how crazy they were. It was only when things started coming out about this story that it looked like it was actually true and he realized that these guys weren't just making stuff up to be freaky or whatever. They were actually telling the truth and it was all recorded in order to get Vincent in on it in the sense that he couldn't say anything because then he could be exposed. So they were going to use that as blackmail on him.

So he got tied up with these huge stories and these sick individuals. Reading the book, Spence comes off as a total psychopath. But unfortunately, not one that's just making stuff up and constantly making himself out to be something that he's not because this guy did have connections and he was blackmailing people and he had a lot of money to throw around doing all this stuff.

That's the Cole's Notes version of it. This was kind of a separate story in the sense that all these DC politicians were involved with this gay escort service. This included huge orgy parties with people on drugs and these encounters would then be used as blackmail, but then it tied into the Franklin scandal with Larry King because Larry King and Spence were buddies and apparently Spence was involved with what was going on in the Franklin scandal.

I just recommend the book to get all the details because he names some interesting people. Let me just get a couple of names for those interested. One was Paul Balic. He was the Secretary of Labour's personal liaison to the White House. There was democratic big-shot Alan Baron. He was another client. This guy was the publisher of the Barron Report, a weekly newsletter on politics. He was also a political pundit for the Wall Street Journal and he frequently appeared on the McNeil Lehrer News Hour. He served a stint as the executive director of the Democratic National Committee. Another guy is congressman Barney Frank, U.S. representative Larry Craig from Idaho.

This was a funny one. This is what Vincent writes about him: "Larry Craig also became a frequent flyer of my escort service. Craig preferred escorts who were quite masculine with a plethora of body hair, bear types. Craig certainly bamboozled the conservative voters of Idaho who ultimately elected him to the US Senate where he developed quite a reputation for voting against gay legislation. Craig voted for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and he voted against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. In fact the human rights campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian civil rights organization, gave him a zero percent concerning his stance on gay rights legislation." So Senator Larry Craig proved to be a major hypocrite, to say the least.

Elan: Yeah, if I remember correctly, Larry Craig was involved in a scandal where he propositioned someone in a bathroom in an airport or something. The interesting thing about these guys is they work so hard to project this image of values and the Judeo-Christian ethic - in the old school sense of the word - and then all of these pastors in the '80s and '90s of the mega-churches, all end up revealing themselves to be cretins and cheaters and just corrupt in any and every manner.

Harrison: It's funny in once sense, but sick in the other. It wasn't just politicians that were involved. Vincent writes that "The Washington Times eventually named a number of the power brokers who attended Spence's telerama soirees." That was his place. "The guests were a veritable who's-who from the media and politics. Media pundits such as Eric Severeid, Ted Koppel and William Safire were in attendance at Spence's parties. High-flying politicians including Senators John Glenn of Ohio and Frank Murkowski of Alaska attended his get togethers too. Spence's home was also a lure for various republican movers and shakers, attracting former ambassadors Robert Neumann, Elliot Richardson and James Lilley. Then-CIA director William Casey and John Mitchell, the disgraced former attorney general under Richard Nixon were personal friends of Spence who frequented his soirees.

One more interesting thing was Jeff Gannon. We remember Jeff Gannon. He was the news reporter guy at the White House for George W. Bush.

Shane: There's a lot of stories in the 2000s regarding Jeff Gannon. I remember his name well.

Harrison: Yeah. So Gannon came under scrutiny of the White House Press Corp at a 2005 Presidential press conference when he asked President George W. Bush a ridiculously partisan question about the democrats' bleak view of the economy, mentioning that a couple of democratic senators had "divorced themselves from reality. Bush took Gannon's question quite seriously, giving a protracted response but it elicited the ire of the White House reporters who started delving into his background and quickly discovered that he was a gay escort. By 2005 Gannon ostensibly worked for Talon News, a virtual news service that didn't have a physical office.

Gannon made over 200 appearances at the White House during his two-year stint as a White House reporter, attending 155 out of 196 White House press briefings. Over a period of 22 months, Gannon checked in with the secret service but he failed to check out on 14 days and on one of those days a press briefing wasn't even held.

So that was the hint of something of a scandal there, that this gay escort seemingly posing as a reporter, checks into the White House all these times, attends all these briefings and checks in - sometimes not even for a briefing - and never checks out from the White House implying that he spent the night. So who was he spending the night with? But the thing is, the secret service was aware of Gannon since at least 1990 because Vincent knew him. He knew him as an escort back at the time when he was running his escort service in DC. It turned out that when Vincent was debriefed in 1990, the information that the secret service had from what they told Vincent and what Vincent told them, they knew about Gannon.

So the whole time the White House knew that this guy had been a gay escort for decades, and yet they were letting him sleep over at the White House.

Shane: That's why they were getting him in there.

Harrison: Exactly.

Shane: But it gives knew meaning to the word presstitute.

Harrison: Yeah. Check out the book. It's a pretty good read and very interesting to see what was going on and how it was handled. Vincent was running an escort service but from the treatment that he got from the federal government and the secret service and everyone else involved, they ruined this guy's life. He's now an entrepreneur. He's successful so they didn't totally break him, but it is a pretty sad story, from several angles. I'd recommend checking it out. Confessions of a DC Madam.

Elan: Well there's another angle to all of this, in response to what you were saying earlier Shane in your looking at all this as a new emergence of blackmail for whatever purposes that may be in the works on the part of certain elite circles. On the one hand I'm wondering if the exposure to all of these stories and the exposure that all of these individuals are getting is to kind of triangulate them into taking further action that would serve the purposes of certain agendas that they have. And on the other, I think the word apocalypse means unveiling. It's a rather strong word, certainly, but with the advent of the internet, as noisy as it is with information, it is, in these very tumultuous times, an opportunity for everybody to really help with the unveiling.

In other words, because we've been subjected, as a body of humanity on this planet, to so much violence and abuse and injustice and corruption, it comes with in once sense a kind of cosmic justice that we're finally getting to learn about these very shocking and so pervasive circles of depravity that exist at the highest levels. It's still mind-boggling and you had said that last time too, that exists at such a level and to such an extent. So you have to wonder if there's more - not to get too metaphysical or anything - but if there's some kind of natural process that's been going on here for the past few years where again and again and again we see each story just worse than the next. Some of these stories, they make them look like child's play and I'm thinking now in particular about the abuse in stories of the children in France who were documented as being part of these satanic groups. It went beyond rape and physical abuse. It went to the levels of just the most horrific torture you can imagine with other children being witnesses, protected by police in those areas as well.

So why now? Is it part of some larger metaphysical or cosmic justice that we're getting to see these stories come to the fore?

Shane: Yeah, it may be. I was also thinking earlier it's so pervasive and a lot of these power players have been comfortable in just taking off the mask and as these lies are built and spread and so much absurdity around it too, I don't think they can recognize that. So it may in part be this dynamic where we've just become so infested with these creatures and their dynamic that it's going to be in the media. We're going to see these things.

Harrison: I think that regardless of why it's happening, there is a certain effect and that the Abu Ghraib scandal is similar in a way, that by exposing these things on the one hand a bit of the truth is revealed that has a polarizing effect on humanity and that is, those who are actually disgusted by it and those who are like "Yeah, that's great! I want to be part of this." So we have this worldwide process, because of the media and media coverage, where these images are available to people's' consciousness and that has an effect on them that can polarize them one way or the other.

We've talked about this dynamic in the past and how it happens in times of war, for example; in the civil war going on in Ukraine how this has shown itself very starkly where the worst and the best of humanity comes out. You have examples of heroism and people putting their lives on the line for something that they perceive to be greater than their own life, some kind of meaning. Then on the other hand you have people who just descend into the most animalistic of human behaviours, if you can call it human behaviours. So you have this very polarizing effect.
You can see it going on in Sebastian Haffner: Defying Hitler on a countrywide scale where you have the polarizing of fundamental world views, on politics, on humanity, on rights and values and justice and just how opposite the reactions can be. Whatever the cause, it's having a pretty profound effect.

Shane: And a massive one too. You were talking about Defying Hitler and that we saw this dynamic within Germany, but when you look at the United States' influence and its massive, massive dominance all over the world, and you look at a map of US bases for example, the world is littered with these things.

Harrison: Infested.

Shane: Infested, exactly. I think there's somewhere around 1,000 US military bases or more - a lot of them that we don't know about - all over the world and is one of the means with which the US maintains its influence. And with that opening, there are plenty of countries who do identify with the way the United States perceives the world and within that there is that fundamental choice of how you see reality. Is it this psychopathic reality or is it actual reality; reality that's composed of objective events?

Elan: It's interesting that it is as though we're being presented with a choice in a very real way. In the bible you have this idea of the "mark of the beast" and you have all sorts of folks ascribing these bar codes and numbers, tracking and microchipping of individuals to keep track of them. But there's another idea, that it is the acceptance of torture as a means to do anything, which would be the mark of the beast and to accept that idea would be to stain your soul, to stain yourself, your being with something that is fundamentally beastly or inhuman.

So like you were saying Harrison, there is this kind of fundamental choice and polarization that we're seeing right now in all these events. We have to ask of ourselves when it comes right down to it, deep down, what position are we going to take on this? Are we going to believe the lies that support justification for these actions or are we at least going to begin the process of questioning why people are being made to suffer to such a degree that they are and find it in ourselves to take a stand, at the very least with ourselves but hopefully in a greater conversation that people can have with others that communicates that it is not acceptable on any level, to condone it, or shove it aside, or ignore it, or just not acknowledge it is to in a way become complicit with it?

It's an important topic I think. We're seeing it in many different spheres and I think as things continue to destabilize and get worse economically and environmentally, this choice is going to be ever more present in people's' minds as they decide how they're going to respond to information and circumstances that they find themselves in.

Shane: One of these spheres I think, is certainly with how the United States portrays Russia and what Russia is actually doing. We just saw confirmation for the new joint chiefs of staff this week, General Joseph Dunford. He is the latest in this long line of psychopathic, delusional reality-makers. During his confirmation hearing I think about three weeks ago, he was making these delusional statements about Russia. I think we have a clip.
Senator: ...what our threats are today. What would you consider the greatest threat to our national security?

Dunford: My assessment today Senator, is that Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security. In Russia we have a nuclear power. We have one that not only has the capability to violate the sovereignty of our allies and to do things that are inconsistent with our national interest, but are in the process of doing so. So if you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I'd have to point to Russia. And if you look at their behaviour, it's nothing short of alarming. Certainly the relationship with Russia a few years ago, if you recall, we actually were including them in NATO meetings and so forth and those kinds of exchanges have stopped. From my perspective, my role would be even as the relationship is challenged and even with the difficulties that we face right now, I think it's important that we attempt to maintain a military-to-military relationship, an effective military-to-military relationship with our Russian counterparts to the extent possible to mitigate the risk of miscalculation and begin to turn the trend in the other direction in terms of trust.
Yeah, crazy. He said this a day after another military official, the secretary of the air force or one of those people, came out saying that she believed that Russia was the greatest threat to the United States. So you have this pattern of these high up military officials saying these things when there is no basis in reality. Russia hasn't done anything remotely close to anything that the United States is doing on a daily basis and for decades.

Harrison: "Violating the sovereignty of our allies." What about the sovereignty of the people who aren't your allies? Like all those sovereign nations that the United States is violating. I guess it doesn't matter.

Shane: No, not at all. It's such a bizarre thing and like we were saying earlier, these lies are just compounding and they're getting bigger and bigger. The choice is in front of people whether they're going to choose to accept these lies or whether they're actually going to think about these things.

Elan: I was wondering in listening to him just now if maybe he was ...

Shane: On something?

Elan: Well we know he's on something. He's on the Power Trip USA. But he mentioned keeping in close contact with the military of Russia to prevent some kind of greater conflagration. "We have to keep in touch with our counterparts in order to prevent any kind of accidental beginning of something". Did you guys get the sense that maybe he's setting up something there or was that just kind of something he put out there just to support the idea that Russia could somehow be an aggressor?

Shane: Well in his interpretation, I think what he was meaning was a continual buildup of NATO around Russia. That's being contact with the Russian military. And also he did go on during that hearing to say that he believes "We should be arming the Ukrainian soldiers". He's all for that. So he really does want war with Russia.

Elan: Well on the subject, it's very interesting that Russia has recently enacted a law that would consider organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy or that they would have to register as foreign agents and that their behaviour would be limited to certain things within Russia.

Shane: Is this an amendment to the current law? I think they do have something on the books now where they do say there's this registration process for foreign agents.

Elan: Yeah. Back in 2012 there was a law signed that gave authorities the power to declare organizations foreign agents if they were engaged in any kind of politics or received money from abroad. I think that this goes a step further. For one thing, according to the National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who wrote a piece for the Washington Post recently in response to all of this, he is lashing out at the fact that Russia is basically saying his National Endowment for Democracy is undesirable. And it is undesirable!

Last week there were these guys who were being promoted and propped up within Russia, to speak out and call themselves pro-democratic and they're being directly or indirectly funded by organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy. So we're seeing a lot of backlash and this guy called Gershman, who has been with the endowment from the very beginning, which is for decades, is really pissed off. So he writes this article for the Washington Post and he leaves out a lot of crucial points and one is that the US has legislation itself about registering as a foreign agent. The US would never allow this sort of thing with the exception of course of AIPAC and it doesn't have any choice in that matter I suppose.

Shane: It's basically "do as I say, not as I do". You can look at the same thing in terms of military bases. How many foreign military bases are in the United States? None!

Elan: So a little bit about the NED. It was originally created as a soft power organization, non-governmental organization that would do what the CIA had done for many years and that is to covertly infiltrate a country, pay off or blackmail certain organizations and leaders, except the NED does it by establishing these colour revolutions or pro-democracy groups that really are just there to promote US policy and put in a puppet regime. Darn, it's almost an hour into the show and we didn't do our commercial yet.

Harrison: Yeah, we've been putting it off just because you know how much we hate advertising.

Shane: Gotta pay the bills fellows.

Elan: I'm going to continue with some of this after the commercial.

Harrison: Okay. So here we go. A word from our sponsors.

Elan: Let's get it over with.
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Harrison: Those damn MISIS!

Shane: That's quite an extensive customer list there.

Elan: That would be an example of hard power I guess. Where do we get these sponsors from Harrison?

Harrison: I don't know, but these guys MISIS, sounds like they've got a pretty good track record. I'd go with them, just based on the quality of the advertising. I'm a sucker for a good ad.

Elan: I guess that's where organizations like the NED come in, where they have to be a little more delicate about taking over a country's political apparatus and instituting their own policies, where they can't quite be so violent. They have to use soft power and kind of change things from within to make it look like there's this naturally occurring uprising from people who are looking for a better way or a more democratic or western way. And of course the problem is, I think, that many of these people are well-intended. Tell me one country in the world that doesn't have problems with their economy or with...

Harrison: Politicians.

Elan: Politicians.

Harrison: Corruption.

Elan: Yeah. So they form these uprisings that are by these bought and paid for promoters of democracy and they chant these slogans and speak these talking points and they're largely ignorant of to what end these movements are being steered and why they're being created to begin with.

Shane: I think they don't even actually need to fundamentally change the opinions of people, but they just need to have that presentation where it seems to exist. So they'll go in, largely working with these ideologies and utilize bought and paid for press and media and broadcast their message and make it appear like there's this big movement. As long as people think that "A lot of people are thinking this. I'm probably in the minority", then they can go in and really conduct these types of operations without too much protest from people because there's this belief that "This is happening. There's this movement" and so on.

Elan: Just getting back to this lashing out against Russia, and calling it undemocratic and bad for the Russian people because of Russia's very smart choice to isolate and limit the effects of these NGOs from operating within Russia, it's interesting to read Carl Gershman's language here. He says:
The latest move announced Tuesday is to declare the NED an undesirable organization under the terms of a law that Mr. Putin signed in May. The law bans groups from abroad who are deemed a threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, its defence capabilities and its national security.

The charge against the NED is patently ridiculous. The NED's grantees in Russia last year ran the gamut of civil society. They advocated transparency in public affairs for corruption and promoted human rights, freedom of information and freedom of association, among other things. All these activities to make for a healthy democracy that are seen as threatening from the Kremlin's ramparts.

The new law on undesirables comes in addition to one signed in 2012 that gave authorities the power to declare organizations foreign agents if they are engaged in any kind of politics and receive money from abroad. The designation from the Stalin era implies espionage.
Well that's exactly what it is. It's highly organized...

Shane: And they are foreign agents. Hello! The language is so bizarre. He's outraged that they'll be called foreign agents and they are foreign agents.

Harrison: I love the list of the great things that the NED does, the great things that they stand for, which happen to be things that don't exist in the United States.

Elan: Well this is interesting because you mentioned earlier Harrison, that William Casey, the former head of the CIA had been involved - it's just a coincidence that a lot of these figures come up again and again in various ways. So CIA director William Casey actually had a hand in the NED's creation. He worked with a senior CIA covert operation specialist named Walter Raymond, Jr. to establish the NED in 1983. Casey and Raymond, from his assignment inside of President Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, focused on creating a funding mechanism to support groups inside foreign countries that would engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA had historically organized and paid for covertly.

This is from an article by Robert Perry by the way. Perry goes on to say that to partially replace that CIA role, the idea emerged for a congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this money. So once again it's like more/better/different. It's another slicker, less obvious way for them to achieve what they've always done, which is to subvert, take over and dominate countries that they want to have some kind of rule or influence over.

So that's an interesting article. It's by Robert Perry. I think it's on SOTT. It's interesting to note also that China a few weeks ago, has also been putting through their own anti-NGO laws. They're following Russia's lead on this and it's kind of a common sense thing to do at this point because China knows that the US is gunning for them as well.

The list of non-governmental organizations is quite long as well. You have the Open Society funded by George Soros. That's also been put on the list by Russia. And how can they not? You recently had in Armenia an attempt by Open Society-funded political groups who were trying to start this electric revolution which began as a demonstration against the high price of electricity that the people of Armenia were experiencing and talking out against.

That seems to be their hook. They take one or two social issues that are probably legitimate and they ride the coattails of that and turn that into a cause that would be a back door for US influence. Apparently this electric revolution in Armenia has petered out. Russia has been sharing information about this dynamic with the media and people who are a little smarter and people are catching on. So I think this thing is going to be a lot more difficult to do. I think the smarter governments of the nations of the world have got the US's number and this is full spectrum defence against these covert kinds of attacks.

Shane: The thing is that with any country in the type of world that we live in, there's going to be some types of issues with human rights but the way that these NGOs operate is by using these issues as a means of pursuing more covert and really destructive interests. We see all the time the United States talking about human rights violations in China or in Russia and mostly with Russia in regards to gay rights.

For anybody who's really looked into the issue, the only law in Russia is regarding not publicizing sexuality, not even just homosexuality, but non-mainstream sexuality to children. Since two percent of the population is gay, I think that's a fairly understandable law. Now the United States has taken that and twisted it to say that Russia's the most anti-gay country in the world and deserves to have all of this anti-Russian sentiment directed against it.

There was one video I remember seeing in the past couple of weeks where there was a couple who were trying to make this point of how unfriendly Russians are towards gays. They were walking through and videotaping and showing people's' responses. They weren't generally welcomed and the point of the video was to show this immense hostility and I don't think it necessarily achieved that. It did show that gays aren't necessarily welcomed in Russia, but the follow up to this video I thought was interest.

There was another couple who did a similar experiment in Kiev and the intention was to show how progressive Kiev has become in their views and it ended with six or seven guys pepper spraying them and kicking them. They were physically assaulted. It was really bizarre because they still believed, despite this attack, that one of the makers of the video was quoted as saying how open the Ukrainian people are. It just totally conflicted with them getting attacked. It reminded me of a few months ago, earlier in the summer, there was a march for equality in Ukraine - I'm not sure if it was Kiev - and they had to conduct this parade under a lot of secrecy. Just to be invited you had to be cleared by knowing somebody who was putting on the parade. Despite all these types of protections, there was still a fairly large attack that broke out during the parade and nine or ten protesters were injured and nine policemen were injured and one of them ended up in the hospital with a severed artery.

So this really goes to show that what's being depicted as western values and just how big of a façade it is.

Harrison: I think it's a great success of western values.

Shane: Yeah, exactly.

Harrison: Freedom and democracy. That's what it's all about.

Elan: I'm willing to bet Shane, that the vast majority of Ukrainians are probably tolerant individuals.

Shane: Exactly. You have this little Nazi problem.

Elan: They've basically been empowered to go ape-shit all over the normal people of Ukraine. What's really funny is this poll Harrison - I know you know about it - that was conducted in Ukraine. Maybe you want to just mention a little bit about that.

Harrison: Yeah. This crazy nationalist news site in Ukraine decided to take a poll, asking something like "Who would you trust to rule or lead Ukraine?" They had a list of people you could choose from, politicians from all over the world; Ukraine's own politicians, all the big names like Tymoshenko and Poroshenko and Yarosh and Kolomoisky, all the big names in Ukraine. Pretty much all the Ukrainians got either zero or close to one percent. Poroshenko got two percent and Vladimir Putin got 84% on this right-wing Ukrainian website, which was pretty funny. Of course the crazy Ukrainians will respond "Oh, this must be Putin's internet trolls, the guys that he keeps chained up in his basement on their computers spreading pro-Putin propaganda all over the internet. It must be these guys". There was something like 54,000 votes for Putin.

Even if that was the case, you had 500 people vote for Poroshenko so where's all the popular support for these actual Ukrainian politicians? There were probably a few Putin trolls on there loading, but even if there weren't it wouldn't make a difference because all of the Ukraine politicians still got nothing.

Elan: So yeah, that just speaks to the extent to which the US-dominated/propagated/ instigated/supported/financed coup in Ukraine in 2014 really is this kind of virus of psychopathy that's been injected into that country where most of the people would actually say in spite of everything, they would support Putin as their leader more than Poroshenko by 84 times. That speaks volumes. I wish that article could be spread quite a bit further.

Harrison: On the subject of Ukraine/Russia news, MH17 is in the news again recently. A few stories have come out but the big one is the UN Security Council resolution that was vetoed by Ukraine. This one was calling for a tribunal to charge the guilty party. So Russia vetoed it of course leading to the expected response "Oh how could Russia do this?! It's just giving Russia and the guilty parties impunity and it's obvious that Russia is guilty and they they're only viewing this because they know they're guilty and it's just a horrible miscarriage of justice and blah, blah, blah".

Which of course is all total nonsense because a few things aren't taken into account. This was a UN Security Council resolution calling for a tribunal, but not for an investigation. This was just for a tribunal. Of course and investigation and a tribunal are two different things and if these people in the media who are framing it in this totally disingenuous way, have any memory or decency, they would also remember and tell their viewers or their readers that it was Russia, remember, that supported, drafted and introduced the resolution last year, Resolution 2166 on MH17, calling for "a full, thorough and independent international investigation into the incident in accordance with international civil aviation guidelines and demands that those responsible for the incident be held to account and that all states cooperate fully with the efforts to establish accountability."

So Russia actually fully supports the investigation and fully supports officially and legally, holding the guilty parties to account. The reason Russia vetoed this latest resolution is because it was transparently an effort to be able to set up this sham tribunal that would charge Russia for being guilty, forgetting about any investigation because the investigations is a total fraud anyway. When are they going to come out with some actual evidence? It was going to be this kangaroo court set up to blame whomever, not based on the actual investigation. If you actually followed what is in the UN precedent, the one everyone agreed on, you do an investigation and then from that, you proceed to the holding to account.

So Russia supports that. It's not like they're saying "Oh, we've got to be very careful because they're getting on to us and we might get tried in this tribunal". It's nothing of the sort! What's also interesting about this is that this is totally unprecedented. There has never been a tribunal like this before for an aviation disaster of this type. What reeks of hypocrisy is actually a few things. First of, Russia has been pretty much the only party out of the countries involved, that has turned over all the data or at least some relevant data that they have on the downing of MH17. Ukraine/Kiev still hasn't released their recordings of the Dnipropetrovsk tower communications there. The US hasn't released the satellite photos that it undoubtedly has that could show Russia's involvement if they had it.

So who's obfuscating the investigation at this point? Well it's Ukraine and the United States, along with their lackeys the Netherlands and they're probably strong-arming Malaysia too.

Another aspect of the hypocrisy of this is that two of these countries, Ukraine and the US, have shot down civilian airliners before and were not held to account. In 2001 Ukraine shot down a Russian PU 154 over the Black Sea and killed all 78 civilians onboard. They initially denied that they were involved in the shoot-down but then President Kuchma was forced to say "Take a look around at what is going on in the world and in Europe. We are not the first or the last ones to shoot down a civilian plane. No need to make a tragedy out of this mistake. Mistakes happen all the time, even bigger mistakes than this one." So there's Kuchma taking no responsibility for it.

The United States too though, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 over Iranian airspace. So after Iran called the United Nations Security Council to condemn the United States for downing this civilian airline, President George H.W. Bush said "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are. I'm not an apologize for America kind of guy." Just look at that and compare that with what's going on today and what these people are saying about Russia, who didn't even shoot down the plane.

Elan: Well it's despicable on a number of levels, but in the grander scheme of things regarding MH17, it seems like there is a race right now with competing narratives because you have some very interesting information coming out, especially in the past few weeks and months, regarding what may have actually happened to MH17 that's being shared by the alternative media and by Russian aviation analysts. And all of this information isn't being looked at, taken onboard or even considered by those who are leading the charge against Russia for not being accepting of this kangaroo court tribunal. Why? Because they don't want these facts acknowledged. The political will to make Russia guilty of this far outweighs any desire to come to the truth of what may actually happen.

In any case, one of the more interesting pieces of information to come out was a conversation that was recorded by some air traffic folks who sold this information and recording to an analyst in Russia. It was only paid for after it was considered legitimate and authentic. Sergey Sokolov, an aviation expert with the Russian Federal Information Centre Analytics and Security offered an account of the last moments of MH17 and he says that he's pretty sure the airliner was destroyed from within and that it was a special operation.

Sokolov details what he says are the cockpit voice recordings between the pilot of an SU 27 combat aircraft and a flight control officer. I think it was determined in another analysis a few weeks ago that was covered by Joe Quinn in an article, that said that it could only have been an SU 27 or a plane like it that had been retrofitted with Israeli technology and electronics and guidance systems, that could have had a second influence on that plane going down and shot it from an elevation that could not have been from a BUK missile on the ground, which people are saying was committed by the Novorossian's.

So during a little bit of that conversation, the officer presumably from the flight control centre says:
7:30. Can you see the target?

Pilot: Yes, I can see it. Leftwards to traverse at higher altitude. Big one right?

Yeah.

Pilot: 7:30. Didn't get it. Repeat. Right, the target is big.
And then Ivanov helped to understand the particularities of the communication of military pilots. He said that "When an interceptor is directed to a target by military flight control, you often hear "target", but in some cases if the target is not military or not specific, such words as "big" are used as well." According to the recording handed over to the editor's office of this organization that put up this information, the pilot was receiving the coordinates of the other aircraft from ground control. A couple of minutes later he reports visual contact with the passenger aircraft and then received his instructions.

You can read this in the article. I think it was posted just today to SOTT. You can read some more of the exchange between the officer and the pilot. So there's all this information coming out now that if given the proper venue and attention, would pose some serious problems for the US and Ukraine because the narrative that they're suggesting about Russia being a part of this will pretty quickly fall apart I think.

Harrison: On the subject of this latest alleged leak, I'm pretty sure that SOTT is the only site that I've seen or am aware of that even proposed the idea of there being a bomb onboard MH17 and so for this internal cause. So I'm open to the possibility that this Sokolov is just reading SOTT and throwing another idea out there. We'll just have to wait to see because I don't think the recording itself has been released. It hasn't been analyzed by anyone except this group that I don't know much about, in Russia.

But I think it is interesting, especially the take home message from it, for me is just that these alternative scenarios don't get any media attention in the US or the west in general. So when I'm talking to someone that just listens to the news on TV or the radio, they're not even aware of the possibility that there was even a jet involved that was shot down by anything other than a BUK missile system, from the Novorossian rebels. That's the only possibility out there, in their minds. They're not even aware that there are other options and other evidence showing other possibilities. So the total media blackout on the alternative possibilities is what gets me, that people aren't even aware that there's even the remotest possibility that Kiev was responsible.

So the presupposition, the thing on everyone's minds whenever they read an article, say about this latest UN resolution that Russia vetoed is that first of all, Russia's guilty and because Russia's guilty, therefore - oh they vetoed this resolution. That means that they're just covering up for themselves. No! There are alternative possibilities that must be kept in mind, but you actually need to read something and find out what they are first instead of just listening to what the mainstream media shoves down your throat.

Shane: Well that's the thing. What most people associate with MH17 is just the barrage of these news reports when it first happened, like "Putin killed my baby!" That's what stays in their mind because the media won't cover any other aspect of that so they just have that emotional attachment and that's what drives everybody.

Elan: It's easy. You're presented with a narrative and all possibilities are closed off to any other theory or information and that's pretty much exactly how we're controlled by the media in every respect until you see it and have some kind of direct proof of it. When we had Joachim Hagopian here he was talking a little bit about his experience with the lawsuit against West Point and how the media completely spun the entire story and made him out to be this slovenly, unappreciative cadet where it was really the leadership of West Point that was out to get him. So he learned firsthand.

He recalls having to call up the newspaper of his hometown and set the record straight, and did it with such conviction that one of the chief editors agreed to interview him again and post the kind of article that would be a retraction or at least a clarification of the facts. So it looks as though unless people demand some truth, they're not going to get it. They're going to get the default narrative that serves the interests of people who understand how the game is played. And most people don't understand how it's played. It's really not a game. It's a life and death struggle to get information that is based on fact.

Harrison: I want to go back to the gay parade that you were talking about Shane, because there was one LGBT parade recently in Jerusalem. This was on Thursday and an ultra-orthodox Jew stabbed at least six people there. This guy was named Yishai Schlissel, a follower of Haredi Judaism which rejects modern secular culture. So he stabbed six people there obviously because he's a lunatic fanatic nutjob. He had actually recently been released from jail after serving a 10 year prison sentence. He was initially sentenced to 12 years for attempted murder but the supreme court of Israel shortened his sentence. Before committing the stabbing in 2005, he reportedly shouted "I came to kill in god's name!" And since his release he has campaigned in his hometown to cancel the parade, handing out handwritten leaflets.
So just another inconsequential lone nut/religious fanatic/terrorist. Did I say that? Can I call this guy a terrorist?

Shane: He's certainly an extremist. He's a terrorist.

Harrison: He's a terrorist. It's got me thinking because there's been a few stories in the news recently that just all came together for me. I saw this one on Facebook and checked it out. There was a flight recently from New Jersey to Toronto and on this flight was a former chef from Halifax, Christine Flynn. The story has come out that a flight attendant had to ask her if she would move her seat from where she was sitting on the plane because an ultra-orthodox Jewish man refused to sit next to her. This was on Monday.

She politely declined, being uncomfortable with the other passenger's manner. Apparently another passenger did offer to change seats with this ultra-orthodox Jew, so he wouldn't have to sully himself by sitting next to a female. Flynn said "He came down the aisle. He didn't actually look at me or make eye contact. He turned to the gentleman across the aisle and said "Change!" He could have made a plan. He could have put in a request to the airline, beforehand that he didn't like women so keep them away from him. But he didn't do that obviously. So she says "When someone doesn't look at you and when someone doesn't acknowledge you as a person because of your gender, you're a lot less willing to be accommodating." No doubt.

Of course this isn't the first time something like this has happened because these ultra-orthodox Jews are ultra kind of crazy when it comes to just interacting with members of the opposite sex. So in the last few years several flights have been delayed from New York to Israel, causing anywhere from a 15 minute to a several hours long delay because of these ultra-orthodox Jewish men who refuse to sit next to women. I think it's just charming, these guys. Such exemplars of religious righteousness and holiness. They are truly doing the will of god by refusing to sit next to women and even look at them or speak to them.

Elan: Well they are the chosen ones, Harrison.

Harrison: Well that reminds me of everyone's favourite Israeli or at least some former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, and an infamous quote from her that I just re-read recently. She said "This country, Israel, exists as the accomplishment of a promise made by god himself. It would be absurd to call its legitimacy into account." Absurd! Okay, that's just stupid. I don't know what to say about that, but I'll probably come up with something after I read this next story.

This one happened just recently, again. It involved the death of an 18-month-old Palestinian child in the occupied West Bank. This after suspected so-called price tag or retaliation arson attack by right-wing Jewish settlers in the West Bank. So the victim's 4-year-old brother and parents were also injured and had to be brought to hospital. The attack took place in the early hours of the morning when the family was fast asleep and could not react immediately. The "price tag" tactic is typically used by radical Jewish settlers attacking Palestinian homes, Christian churches, mosques and government buildings "in response" to Palestinian attacks on Jewish settlements. So they daubed these price tag marks on the family's home.

What really gets me is the official response to this. Lt.-Colonel Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the IDF whom we all love of course, said "This attack against civilians is nothing short of a barbaric act of terrorism. A comprehensive investigation is underway in order to find the terrorists and bring them to justice. The IDF strongly condemns this deplorable act and has heightened its efforts in the field to locate those responsible." This is coming from the IDF which is arguably one of the biggest terrorist organizations on the planet that regularly does things that are infinitely worse - well you can't get worse, but let's say quantitatively they do the same thing and they just multiply it by thousands and thousands and get away with it and then for them to come out and say "Oh this is a deplorable terrorist act" when they do the same thing! I was going to take the lord's name in vain there.

Elan: Go ahead.

Harrison: Jesus!! Related to this, Netanyahu has said similar things but just this Wednesday he approved the construction of 300 new homes in the central West Bank Jewish settlement of Beit El despite international condemnation.

Elan: Yeah, just for a little context, you have these Jewish settlers who are being paid by the Israeli government. Many of them are Americans. Some of them are Russians and from various other places. They're planting them there in the West Bank, in these areas that the whole world has already acknowledged, are Palestinian lands. So you have the high court of Israel every five or ten years saying "You know you can't really build there. It's against the law." Netanyahu does this kind of symbolic destruction or the government does this kind of symbolic stopping of construction in some areas that they're building these settlement on and then it starts up again.

The elephant in the room, the obvious point of all of this is, if you're for this peace process as you claim every so often, why would you continue to build these settlements with these really radicalized, fanatical Jewish settlers who really in their heart-of-hearts believe that they're god's chosen people and the Palestinians go to hell? Why would you continue to support that? It's always been a question in my mind, even before the greater extent of the injustice was known to me. On a very basic level, it's dishonest brokering, fundamentally.

Harrison: It's always a good idea to have someone crazier than you are, that you can point at whenever you do something wrong and say "Hey, look at these crazy guys!" You've got to have space for them, these nice settlements where you can put them so that they can be crazy all they want and then you say "I don't like those guys. They're totally crazy. Even though I put them there. Don't pay attention to the thousands of Palestinians that I've killed. Just look at these guys."

Elan: And that's really what it's about. It's about Lebensraum, if I'm using the word correctly. It's about living space. It's about Eretz Israel. It's about all the things that the Israeli government is willing to do to push native peoples in the Middle East out of their lands. And if they don't do that, then they can divide and conquer these people by supporting al-Nusra Front or ISIS or fomenting dissent and division among groups that already exist there. And they're experts at this and they've been doing it a long time.

One more point about the West Bank in particular, about 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The settlement are actually considered illegal under international law but Israel disputes it and of course no one in the UN or any other governing body has the balls or the determination to actually call Israel on its behaviour.

Harrison: The reality is because everyone knows that Israel is batshit crazy and they're totally afraid. If you just transfer the scenarios with Iran and the nuclear weapons, that's really Israel. Everyone's afraid that Israel is just going to blow up the planet because they are so batshit crazy. It's like "Okay, we'll say that that's illegal and you shouldn't do that but we're not actually going to back it up in any way because we know that you're crazy and that you'll just blow everyone up if we actually try to do anything about it" because these people are crazy.

And that's what really gets me, is that these orthodox Jews can go on flights and act like total lunatic assholes and get away with it and everyone's talking about Muslim extremism when there's Jewish extremists that are just as bad, that being given these posh apartments in occupied territory defended by the Israeli state when they're batshit crazy. These people are lunatics.

Shane: While the IDF is busy stealing land and destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, murdering their children and imprisoning so many Palestinians, people can rest assured that the IDF is actually a humane organization because now they're eating vegans - I'm sorry - they're eating vegan. So apparently now to resurrect this idea that they are this humanitarian-type organization, they are offering people who are vegan, non-leather boots. They can eat lentil burgers and have all of these vegan options because they care about animals rights.

Elan: Is that right?

Shane: Yeah.

Elan: Wow!

Shane: This is the truth.

Elan: That's at least two steps removed from eating bacon I figure.

Shane: Well they can have their lentil burgers but it's just absurd when you see what the IDF is doing and then to have this façade of caring about animals and animal rights. It's such garbage.

Elan: Well speaking of chosen philosophies and global sacrosanct ideas that are foisted upon people that don't know any better, Shane, you had a little bit that you wanted to discuss about global warming?

Shane: Ah yes. I've been getting hot and bothered by global warming. There's been several stories this past couple of weeks. Global warming is always in the news but from time-to-time I'll look up what's going on in this really bizarre reality. So one of the stories is that apparently global warming is causing ISIS.

Harrison: I can see it.

Elan: You mean ice, right? Like the precipitation and then the ice forms after?

Shane: Well that would be probably closer to the truth, but no. It was one of democratic presidential hopefuls. He's Martin O'Malley. He's the previous governor of Maryland. So he told Bloomberg News that all the rise of ISIS was because of climate change and the mega-drought that has affected Syria, has driven farmers and people out of that land and created these conditions of extreme poverty.

There are several issues/problems with this. One is that the people of Syria have experienced drought for many, many, many years and have means of working through that. So to say that they're experiencing drought now and this has caused ISIS to form, just doesn't have any basis in reality and doesn't have any relation to the supposed global warming, which by chance, there is no global warming because there has been no global warming trend for the past 17 years.

Yet we still see story after story that this is the warmest year ever on record. 2015's slated to be the warmest year ever and 2014 was the warmest year ever. No, 2011 was the warmest year ever. But really 1998 was the last time that we really had extreme temperatures and since then there has been no trend. But that doesn't keep people from making these ridiculous claims.

Elan: Let's back up because this is really interesting. You corrected me. I thought it was ice.

Shane: No, it's ISIS.

Elan: So ISIS is going to solve the drought in Syria, according to some? I just don't get it.

Shane: Well there's not much to get I don't think, but he's saying that...

Harrison: Hot weather makes people crazy?

Shane: Yes.

Elan: Oh. Okay. I see. That's a new one on me.

Shane: Well he's not the only one making these types of claims. The Pope recently came out saying that human trafficking is linked to climate change as well and has the same dissimilar basis that climate change is causing this forced migration, it's the number one cause of poverty. But the problem with this is that there aren't any groups of people that are migrating because of climate change. They don't exist. Where are these climate refugees? In the past there have been towns that have had to evacuate, but when we get into this, we're talking about the last mini ice age. It's been some years and we may see something like that down the line.

Harrison: Well you know we're already in an ISIS age so I think that he's got the causation reversed. Global warming, like you're saying Elan, global warming causes ICES because the ice forms as a result of the...

Shane: Mini ice.

Harrison: ...increased precipitation and then it ends up coming down as ice and creating an ice age. So global warming causes global ISIS.

Elan: So maybe the former governor of Maryland read that and somewhere misinterpreted it.

Shane: That's a possibility. But there was actually one sane voice in the media in the past couple of weeks. A Dr. Ivar Giaever . He was the 1973 Nobel Prize winner in physics. He actually made some headlines a few years ago when he quit the American Physical Society over it's official position regarding global warming which is basically saying that global warming is incontrovertible and there's no questioning that. Given that that's a non-scientific stance, he resigned.

He recently gave a speech to a Nobel forum on the topic of global warming and expanded on his position a bit. He goes into a lot of details. It's about a half hour long, worth checking out, going over some of the specific details. I think we have a clip. We'll listen to some of the things he says about not just the specifics, but the general attitude that's pushed about this whole global warming scheme.
Global warming is really a hot topic. And what I said then and which I still believe, is that global warming really has become a new religion because you can't discuss it. It's not proper. If you look at Linda here today, then all the people who are notable people, they have said "climate change" in their talks. All of them have said it. I don't know if they know what they mean, but they have said it anyway. Everybody talks about climate change.

So the American Physical Society, of which I was a member, said the evidence is incontrovertible that global warming exists. Now think about that! This is a physical society and they say you cannot discuss global warming because we believe it's happening. It's like the Catholic church; lots of incontrovertible truth in the Catholic church I'm sure, and here there's an incontrovertible truth in the Physical Society.

So they only answer to that is to resign. And the other thing which upset me is what is the optimum temperature for the earth? Is that the temperature we have right now? That would be the miracle. Maybe it's two degrees warmer. Maybe it's two degrees colder, but nobody has told me what the optimal temperature is for the whole earth. This is a little bit like American foreign policy. The foreign policy wants things to be as they are because we have it good in the United States. But even the foreign policy can't control the climate.

The other thing is that both the alarmists and deniers - I guess I'm quoted as a denier - measures the average temperature for the whole earth for a whole year to a fraction of a degree and that result is significant. Of course it's not! How can you possibly measure the average temperature for the whole earth and for the whole year and come up with a fraction of a degree?

So I have this client here. I think the average temperature of the earth is equal to the emperor's new clothes. It was a boy who cried "The emperor has no clothes on!" And I would cry out and say "You can't measure the temperature for the whole earth with such accuracy!"
Shane: So that was Dr. Ivar Giaever. I think he makes a lot of solid points there, particularly about this idea that we can measure the temperature of the earth, especially over a period of an entire year. This isn't even getting into all the corruption from NASA and the Goddard Institute and the cooking of the books, so to speak. It's a really baffling phenomenon that we're seeing. It's indicative of so many other areas of ideology - and really that's what this is, like he says - global warming has become a religion and it's not something that you can question.

Harrison: Well on that note, I think we're going to wrap it up for the day. We talked about the religion of global warming and the ultra-orthodox religion of those crazy Jewish terrorists and of course the crazy Muslim terrorists. I think all these people just give religion a bad name because now these people, just by virtue of the level of their craziness, get a lot of attention and they're then the people that the crazy atheists focus on to give an image of what religion is. Religion is just the way you live your life. Of course there are many aspects that go along with the way you live your life.

So I think just by looking at these individuals and what they actually do, gives some idea of what their religion really is, and that is animal behaviour and I don't think that's a religion worth living when there's alternatives. I just wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Elan: Yeah, and it's not asking. There's no curiosity there. There are no questions. They live with all the answers and they are an end unto themselves and they close off all possibilities for other information and knowledge and they're kind of stuck.

Harrison: They use religion as a way of doing what they really want to do, which is to hurt people, to kill people, to elevate themselves above other people, to make themselves feel better about themselves and to feel special when that's not religious. That's just psychopathy. That's narcissism. It's the lowest form of human behaviour. These people are an insult to the human race. That's all I have to say about that.

Shane: Well when you look at religion and what it fundamentally is, like you say Harrison, a way of living your life, this idea that we have about religion really is anti-religion. And the same with science. Science and religion can both be immensely valuable things but what they've become today are anti-science and anti-religion. It's become its opposite.

Harrison: And on that note, we'll leave you there for the week. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Tune in tomorrow for Behind the Headlines. They've got a good show with an interview coming up. Everyone take care.

All: Good-byes.