The Bill Kelly Podcast w/ Shiona Thompson:

Walmart confirmed in an email to the Star that it has included security tags on items like fresh beef since 2019 to discourage theft. Could more metal security tags soon be hiding in our food?

From self-checkout cameras to receipt-checking and off-duty police, increased theft prevention practices can be upsetting for customers, experts say. . Before 2020, rates of shoplifting had been increasing for six years, with larger increases in 2018 and 2019. From 2010 to 2019, the rate of shoplifting incidents jumped 39 per cent.

GUEST: Bruce Winder, Retail Analyst & Author

-

United States President Joe Biden has cast the conflict between the western world and its competitors as a clash between “democracies and autocracies”. This masks the American desire for power and the complex realities of creating democracy.

Democracy is supposed to base a state’s legitimacy in its accountability to its people. It supports people’s freedoms and human rights. What these ideals mean in practice and how to achieve them are difficult questions.

But it’s clear the U.S. is no longer a credible champion for, or exemplar of, democracy.

In fact, it has a long history of overthrowing and undermining democracies abroad.

GUEST: Shaun Narine, Professor of International Relations and Political Science with St. Thomas University

-

There’s a theory backed by research that says our Western musical scale is tuned incorrectly. Middle A on a piano keyboard–and thus ever other standard middle A on every instrument–is standardized at 440 Hz. That’s wrong. Mathematical ratios related to tuning, something first discovered by Pythagoras, say that the “natural” frequency of middle A should be 432 Hz.

That seems like a tiny difference–it’s almost an A-flat versus a contemporary natural A–but the effect on the human brain is apparently huge.

GUEST: Alan Cross, Host, The Ongoing History of New Music, Canada’s longest running radio documentary