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

Download: MP3

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

Download: MP3

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.

"For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

- Some dude, somewhere, a long time ago.

Humor me for a moment and pretend that the biblical hell exists. The Global Warming proponents among the world's climate scientists are going there. It's a fitting place for people who prostitute their skills and energy to serve the despicable agenda of the global elite; people who use their positions of influence and authority to bamboozle the world and try to convince us that black is white, up is down and that humans are causing global warming on the planet when the Northern Hemisphere has experienced an unprecedented five successive bitterly cold winters. Perhaps if their transition to hell is sufficiently seamless, and, unaware that anything has changed, they'll be able to convince themselves that they were right all along.

Gifted with minds pre-disposed to scientific investigation and given access to data and instrumentation with which they are supposed to objectively explore our reality, these men and women are, more than anyone else, in a position to influence the course of human destiny towards positive or negative ends.

Sadly, many of them have chosen the road to hell.

Take, for example, the recent IPCC 'Climate Report', wherein many 'esteemed scientists' reaffirm the lie that "human impact [on climate change] is 'unequivocal':

Yet another apparently motiveless massacre has taken place in the U.S., this time in the nation's capital.

It's 16th mass shooting in the U.S. since Obama came to power.

Once again, the initial reports described 'multiple shooters'. Once again, those reports were replaced by 'the lone shooter' narrative, this time a former U.S. Navy reservist named Aaron Alexis.

So, did he just snap and 'go postal'? Given the increasingly stressful financial, social and environmental conditions most of us find ourselves living under, that may well be what happened here.

But it's also worth asking: was Alexis another mind-controlled dupe?

We know that mind control is not science fiction; it's fact. Techniques for manipulating people to undertake horrific acts they would not ordinarily do were perfected by the U.S. government decades ago.

But why would the U.S. government, or any government for that matter, carry out such macabre schemes?

Well, if you generate enough fear, you can get people to accept almost anything.

There's a slight problem with this strategy, however, a problem that could spoil all their best-laid plans.

Let me try to explain...