Got the latest iGadget? Have you joined the Apple Revolution? Apparently more than mere products, there are those who argue that the iPod, iMac, iPhone and iPad are part of an 'Apple Revolution' that elevated computing - and the development of human consciousness itself - to a higher plane. But are such plaudits really merited?

Steve Jobs' legacy undoubtedly influenced computing in a big way, but Apple is, of course, just one company among many. This week on SOTT Talk Radio we're going to look at the state of information technology and ask whether it's liberating us, or imprisoning us. From tablets and laptops to wi-fi and smartphones, what effects are these tech toys having on humanity?

Running Time: 02:10:00

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The history of the national conviction that dietary fat is deadly, and its evolution from hypothesis to dogma, is one in which politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the public have played as large a role as the scientists and the science.

~ Gary Taubes

Finally someone from the conventional world of nutrition has stepped forward to state the obvious: Swedish expert committee: A low-carb diet is most effective for weight loss. Mainstream guidelines can no longer ignore what the alternative media has been saying for years: animal fats are good for our health. Every single person in the world should take this opportunity to redeem our ancestral diet which saw us thrive as intelligent human beings. It is about time to hold accountable the aberration of a diet that has taken hold of our world today, with processed and high-carbohydrate foods that perpetuate the worst state of health human history has ever seen.

Big Agra, Big Pharma and the Food Industry reign over a population crippled with dementia, diabetes, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, allergies, respiratory problems, digestive problems, and mood disorders which no mainstream guideline can heal or cure satisfactorily. If something is achieved, it is a very bad quality of life at best, requiring something between 4 and 12 pills per day to sustain, and which slowly poisons even the most resilient.

Nurses around the world train diabetic people on dietary guidelines which only perpetuate and worsens their disease. You might be familiar with the following argument: "When calculating your insulin requirements, ignore fats as they don't raise insulin." Right there you have a big clue to the cure! Yet the brainwashing and lack of critical thinking is such that health care providers can't recognize the solution right in front of them even if they spell it out themselves. Then a nonsensical protocol is advised where people have to eat up to 5 times a day, including a carbohydrate meal every single time, just so that prescribed insulin doesn't bring blood sugar levels to dangerously low levels. Most brochures and guidelines given to diabetic patients are written and published by pharmaceutical companies that are then selling the very same prescribed insulin. Imagine if people knew that they only need to drop the carbs in order to decrease their insulin needs. God forbid they should ever cure their diabetes with a low carb diet!

In about 1999 I was asked to analyze the data of pregnant women with respect to smoking for a major health insurance company. They were running a campaign to get pregnant women to stop smoking and they expected to find interesting data to support their case.

I used to teach college courses covering the topic. The text books said that smoking causes underweight premature babies. Because of this babies of smoking mothers are more likely to have birth defects. With alcohol, two drinks a day was considered safe, but with tobacco, there was no safe threshold. I thought this was rather strange. You smoke one cigarette while pregnant and you are more likely to have birth defects? Even for a hard core health fanatic that is difficult to believe.

Here is what was found in the data. Babies of smoking mothers average weight was 3232 grams (7.1 lbs.). Babies of non-smoking mothers averaged 3398 grams (7.5 lbs.). That is about a half pound difference and it is statistically significant. Seven pounds is a good healthy birth weight that does not set off any alarms. Babies are considered underweight if they are less than 2270 grams (5 lbs.). 4.5% of smoking mothers babies were underweight and 3.3% of non-smoking mothers babies were underweight. This difference is not significant. There is no indication here of a health risk from smoking based on weight.

'All and Everything' returns this week as we discuss the attention a British celebrity has brought to the dire state of affairs for people and planet, the latest NSA Leaks, the narrowly-avoided U.S. dollar default and more!

Russell Brand on revolution: hero or villain? And what about Ed Snowden? Sincere people speaking truth to power, a case of the blind leading the blind, or is something else afoot?

NSA-gate continues courtesy of The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Le Monde, through which it emerged this week that Israeli signals intelligence, and not the NSA, was behind massive electronic spying on the French government and people.

America narrowly avoided a currency default, but in the meantime the rest of the world is preparing for life after the petro-dollar... what are you doing to prepare for global systemic collapse?

Meanwhile, Japan has been smacked by dozens of typhoons in quick succession, record early snowfalls have hit northern U.S. states, a(nother) record-breaking heatwave is frying everything in Australia, and fireballs continue raining down from space - NASA's All-Sky Fireball Network captured 15 of them over the U.S. on October 16 alone...

Running Time: 02:05:00

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One of the most compelling non-fiction books I have ever read is 'In Broad Daylight' by Harry N. MacLean, a true account of the life and death of Ken Rex McElroy, a thief, conman and all round deplorable excuse for a human being from Skidmore, Nodaway County, Missouri, USA.

In vivid and shocking detail, MacLean exposes the truly psychopathic nature of McElroy as he intimidated, terrorised and abused his wives and children and the local population over a period of several years. Justice was a long time coming as McEIroy repeatedly thwarted attempts by the local police to catch him in the act, and used the legal system to get away with his egregious behavior. Eventually, after McEIroy shot a local store owner, the townspeople were galvanized to take the law into their own hands, and McEIroy was shot dead 'in broad daylight' on a street in Skidmore as he sat in his truck. No one was ever charged with his murder. Few, if any, mourned his passing.

I was reminded of Ken McEIroy's story recently because the residents of a town in the same Nodaway County Missouri (and not far from Skidmore) have been in the news.

In January 2012, 14-year-old Daisy Coleman and a 13-year-old girl friend snuck out of Daisy's house in Maryville, Nodaway County, at around 1am and met up with a couple of 'jocks' from their local high school. One of the 'jocks', Matthew Barnett, and a friend drove Daisy and her friend to Barnett's house. Daisy was given a tall glass of clear alcohol that the boys called the "bitch cup"; after that, she remembers nothing until a few hours later when, in a state of near hypothermia her mother, Melinda, found her scratching at the door of her house. It was while Melinda was helping Daisy to bathe that she saw the redness around her daughter's genitalia and buttocks. It hurt, Daisy said, when her mother asked about it. Then Daisy began crying.

I narrowly avoided spilling tea all over my keyboard this morning when I read that this year's Nobel 'Peace' Prize has been awarded to international 'chemical weapons watchdog', the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Forgive my cynicism, but after Warmonger-in-Chief Obama was awarded the gong in 2009, and the duplicitous EU last year, it seems pretty clear to me that the selection of this year's winner is once again a political statement in favour of war-making.

Neither Syria nor the OPCW's work with UN inspectors in Syria is mentioned in the Nobel Committee's press release. In fact, the U.S. and Russia are singled out for their failure to comply with treaty obligations. Rest assured, however, that CNN and the rest of the lamestream media is making hay out of this to refocus international attention on the U.S.-led agenda for shock and awe in Syria:

CNN
Fri October 11, 2013

The Nobel Peace Prize has turned the global spotlight back on the conflict in Syria.

The prize committee in Oslo, Norway, awarded it Friday to the international chemical weapons watchdog helping to eliminate the Syrian army's stockpiles of poison gas, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Its inspectors have just begun with that work in the active war zone, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded them the prize in support of the arduous and life-threatening task that lies ahead of them.

Two BBC news stories, one published on August 29^th, the other on September 30^th, contain video of an alleged Syrian government "napalm" attack on a "Syrian school playground" during the last week of August 2013. The September 30th video refers back to the original story, one month previously.

Both videos are from the same 'Panorama' investigative reporting program that aired on August 30th, the same day that the UK parliament rejected Prime Minister David Cameron's attempt to sanction the NATO bombing of Syria.

Both videos contain the testimony of an English doctor allegedly working with the supposedly humanitarian 'NGO' 'Hand in Hand for Syria'.

The doctor in question may be 'Doctor Rola Hallam', who appears to be a British ex-pat or 'exiled' Syrian woman or, perhaps, the daughter of Syrian 'exiles'.

Doctor Hallam appeared on BBC's Newsnight program on August 31^st, one day after the UK parliament vote, to complain about the fact that Cameron's move to attack Syria had been rejected by the UK parliament.

This week on SOTT Talk Radio we interviewed author and activist Lierre Keith, whose book The Vegetarian Myth examines the tenets of vegetarian ideology from dietary, environmental and philosophical perspectives.

Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But she now argues that people have 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.

Running Time: 02:03:00

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As a SOTT editor, I like to keep an eye on what's going on in the animal kingdom. The big news in recent years on that score has, of course, been the high number of mass animal deaths. But has anyone else noticed the extraordinary number of stories about snakes in the news lately? I first noticed a spate of snake stories at the beginning of the summer, and over the last couple of months snakes have been turning up in close proximity to people, and in some highly unusual settings, at an alarming rate. There have also been some particularly horrifying reports of attacks and resulting fatalities by escaped pet pythons - on both children and domesticated animals alike.

It seems appropriate that 2013, according to the Chinese zodiac tradition, is the Year of the Snake!

The following is a quick run-down of some incidents worth highlighting, starting in May, which initially show a slow build-up of such stories, leading fairly rapidly to 'spikes' in reports, some of which we've carried on SOTT.

As I glance through the headlines today, I feel a rock sinking to the pit of my stomach with the realization that the pathological minority ruling our world are truly taking all of us over the cliff. I am reminded of something Andrew Lobaczewski wrote in his seminal work, Political Ponerology:

"Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing."

Applied to the topic of this essay, the saying is not just a metaphor; it is deeply and frighteningly accurate. Imagine a world that believes in global warming that is hit by the sudden onset of an ice-age. Studies reveal that ice ages are probably preceded by periods of freak weather patterns (check) hot spots and cold spots (check) torrential, localized rains and flooding (check) increased comet dust in the atmosphere (check), increased volcanism (check) a series of particularly cold and harsh winters (check) interspersed with localized heatwaves and drought (check); and then, finally, the watershed winter comes when the increased heating from within the planet itself (evidenced by the increasing volcanism) and its concomitant increased evaporation of the seas, combines with the cooled and lowered upper atmosphere, and the snow begins to fall and fall... and fall... and fall. Convert the extraordinary rains that have fallen in parts of the upper northern hemisphere in the past few years to snow volumes, and you can easily see that entire regions could be quickly buried under many meters of snow that, assuming that the albedo effect does not rapidly take over and prevent the snow from melting, by the time it did melt, multiplied millions of living things - including people - would have perished, buried along with the pathological leaders they have erroneously believed had their best interests at heart.