A huge storm rears up like a giant tidal wave, sparking horizontal bolts of lightning.

Mike Hollingshead took this snap in Nebraska, USA.

The storm chaser, 35, said: "I've seen some cool storms but this one takes the cake."

Barely two weeks after the failure of a doomsday prediction by a United States (U.S.) based preacher, Russia and U.S. scientists are at war over another perceived threat to human existence.

The danger this time is not an apocalyptic occurrence, but the smacking of the Earth by a giant asteroid in five months time.

The potentially perilous space rock is known as Asteroid 2005 YU55, a round mini-world that is about 1,300 feet (400 metres) in diametre.

According to U.S. scientists, this asteroid will approach the Earth within a scant 0.85 lunar distances in early November.

Due to its size, and the way it will whisk by so close to the Earth, an extensive campaign of radar, visual and infrared observations are being planned.

Today a French government committee is expected to pronounce an opinion on a new proposal to filter and block web content.

The French media are suggesting that it represents industrial-scale filtering. Indeed, the proposal is the most far-reaching one we've seen to date. It is certainly over-broad and puts at risk both freedom of expression and free trade.

The French government proposes to give various ministries the power to order ISPs and web hosts to block content. Blocking orders could apply to commercial and non-commercial content, and potentially also to advertising and search engines.

It is all set out in a Decree which amends the existing law on electronic commerce. The Decree has been sent to the Conseil

Nationale du Numérique for an opinion, which is due today .

How many times have we all heard this bunk myth repeated?

"Humans can't actually digest meat: it rots in the colon."

And its variant: "Meat takes 4-7 days to digest, because it has to rot in your stomach first."
(Some variations on this myth claim it takes up to two months!)

Like most vegetarian propaganda, it's not just false, it's an inversion of truth. As the proverb says, "When you point your finger, your other three fingers point back at you." Let's take a short trip through the digestive system to see why!

A Trip Through The Human Digestive System (abridged)

Briefly, the function of digestion is to break food down as far as possible - hopefully into individual fats, amino acids (the building blocks of protein), and sugars (the building blocks of carbohydrates) which can be absorbed through the intestinal wall and used by our bodies.

While we were not watching, conspiracy theory has undergone Orwellian redefinition.

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps.

For example, online news broadcasts of RT have been equated with conspiracy theories by the New York Times simply because RT reports news and opinions that the New York Times does not report and the US government does not endorse.

In other words, as truth becomes uncomfortable for government and its Ministry of Propaganda, truth is redefined as conspiracy theory, by which is meant an absurd and laughable explanation that we should ignore.

As the mainstream media continues to be obsessed with Anthony Weiner and his bizarre adventures on Twitter, much more serious events are happening around the world that are getting very little attention. In America today, if the mainstream media does not cover something it is almost as if it never happened. Right now, the worst nuclear disaster in human history continues to unfold in Japan , U.S. nuclear facilities are being threatened by flood waters, the U.S. military is bombing Yemen, gigantic cracks in the earth are appearing all over the globe and the largest wildfire in Arizona history is causing immense devastation. But Anthony Weiner, Bristol Palin and Miss USA are what the mainstream media want to tell us about and most Americans are buying it.

In times like these, it is more important than ever to think for ourselves. The corporate-owned mainstream media is not interested in looking out for us. Rather, they are going to tell us whatever fits with the agenda that their owners are pushing.

That is why more Americans than ever are turning to the alternative media. Americans are hungry for the truth, and they know that the amount of truth that they get from the mainstream media continues to decline.

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal's office.

And it doesn't stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

On-farm Processing

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I've coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn't matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.

When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.

What we have learned from this year's Bilderberg conference

This year, Bilderberg was bigger than ever. Bigger crowds, bigger names, more coverage. So here, starting with about the least most important thing, is what I've learned from this year's Bilderberg summit in St Moritz. I've got a bit of a crush on the Chinese vice-minister for foreign affairs

Move over Queen Beatrix. Fu Ying is my new postergirl. I can't help myself. She just seems so ... fun.

Always hopping about, taking photos of wild flowers, pointing at the view, laughing - she's like, I don't know, a normal person or something. I look at Ying and have to wonder if China's really such an oppressive place after all. It can't be! Not with people like lovely Fu Ying running it. I think we've been misinformed. Western lies. Fu is the real China.

The BBC turned up!

But only in the form of Marcus Agius, the senior non-executive director on the BBC's executive board. He's also chairman of Barclays, and extremely well connected. Here he is, queuing to get on a private jet home.

Also on board was Washington hawk, and one of Bilderberg's nastiest pieces of work, Richard Perle. Boy, that's someone you don't want to get stuck next to on flight. I bet he really hogs the armrest.

As the Mahatma Gandhi once said:

"First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win."

The paleo movement grew slowly for many years in the obscurity of Stage 1, and spent perhaps a year in Stage 2 being mocked as the "caveman diet". Now, after several years of exponential growth and a stubborn refusal to be co-opted, we have finally achieved Stage 3, "Then they fight you."

The latest example, of course, is the dismissive baloney pushed by the "experts" hired by US News and World Report, which ranks paleo dead last among 20 different diets - behind such food-free nutritional gimmicks as Slim-Fast and the Volumetrics Diet.

I have my differences with Loren Cordain, but his rebuttal is both comprehensive and devastating. Respect.

Also, the reader votes for "Did this diet work for you?" show that paleo is by far the most successful of the diets, with several thousand "Yes" votes and under 100 "No" votes. The only other diets to win more "Yes" than "No" votes were Weight Watchers and Atkins!

Previous to that, we've seen the repeated hatchet jobs on grass-fed beef by John Stossel (one in print and one on video), both of which use as their sole source non-peer-reviewed "research" from a scientist sponsored entirely by Elanco - a subsidiary of Eli Lilly that manufactures antibiotics and hormonal growth promoters for feedlot cattle, pigs, and chickens! President Obama's personal trainer, in a breathtakingly stupid article, has called paleo "the newest nutritional fad". (Solid rebuttal here.) And the avalanche of anti-paleo articles by "qualified experts" has just begun.

We might expect this sort of offensive from the American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetic Association, because anyone eating any variation on the paleo diet is essentially telling them "All of you have been completely wrong for decades, and your bad advice is killing millions of people each year." And we might expect this sort of offensive from the PCRM, because they're just a front for vegans and animal rights activists.

We've been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we've been led astray--not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won't save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil--the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.

Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

Part 1