In the first half, analyst of geopolitics and foreign policy, Craig B. Hulet, discussed the erosion of citizens rights in America, as well as the global regime of economic interdependence and how it results in conflicts all over the world. There is a lot of fear mongering going on in the US around the issue of terrorism attacks, "and yet from all of my knowledge and my database, the terrorist attacks that have taken place so far, most of them have had some involvement of the FBI as a sting operation...so was it really a terrorist attack they stopped, or were they setting people up and then arresting them?, he asked. The so-called threat of terrorism enables past, current, and future administrations to militarize local law enforcement-- equal to a standing army that operates domestically, Hulet continued.
Law enforcement agencies like the ATF and the DEA usually intervene and catch actual plotting terrorists, "and we honestly don't need Homeland Security," which he believes is an "illegal organization" which has usurped the Justice Dept. and various agencies, and centralized law enforcement & intelligence agencies under the President of the US. In the next few years, Hulet foresees some form of economic collapse, with the possibility of food lines, 10% of savings confiscated by the govt., and pensions and 401k's nationalized. While these events will seem independent of each other, they are planned by the government to yield a specific effect, he suggested. Internationally, the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia will keep pushing to get Assad out of Syria, but "if we keep pushing in this direction, the real conflict may come from China and Russia," leading us into a World War III scenario, he warned.
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In the latter half, researcher and photographer Barrie Schwortz talked about the Shroud of Turin, said to be the burial cloth of Jesus, and reacted to new research that connects the Shroud's creation to an ancient earthquake around 32 AD. According to the latest researchers' theory, the powerful quake could have released neutron emissions that might have interacted with the fibers of the linen burial cloth, inducing the chemical reaction that created the unique facial image. Their research is problematic in several ways, including an overestimation of the magnitude strength of quakes in the Dead Sea, he noted. Further, the radiation hypothesis (which has previously been proposed to explain the Shroud numerous times) was explored by (the late) Raymond Rogers, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and he did not find evidence for it in his testing of samples.
While scientific tests have shown that the Shroud is neither a painting or a photograph, it still remains a mystery even after all the chemistry, physics, and spectrometry that have been applied, Schwortz remarked, adding that perhaps as technology continues to advance, new methods of testing may yield answers. He also shared details about his personal experiences studying and photographing the Shroud, and how his faith and religious views were affected by it.
News segment guests: Howard Bloom, Catherine Austin Fitts