Leid Stories – 01.06.16

Tear Jerker: Obama Weeps for [Politically Appropriate] Victims of Gun Violence
Does God Love Ugly?: Wheaton to Fire Prof for Pro-Muslim Sympathies
In an emotional, teary-eyed speech yesterday at the White House, President Barack Obama delivered yet another homily about gun violence, imploring an impassive Congress to enact measures to curb illegal gun sales. He’s not waiting for it to act, he said, noting a list of mass killings he linked to easy access to assault weapons. Via executive orders he’ll enact some long-overdue regulations and policies himself, he said. Leid Stories takes a closer look at Obama’s gun-violence pronouncements.
Dr. Larycia Hawkins, the first female African American tenured professor at Wheaton College since its founding in 1860, is soon to be dismissed. She has refused to explain statements that “seem inconsistent with the college’s doctrinal conviction,” the college says, citing a Facebook posting in which Hawkins said that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. Leid Stories asks about Wheaton’s move: Does God love ugly?

The Gary Null Show – 01.06.16

Dr. Gareth Porter is an award-winning historian, an independent investigative journalist and policy analyst who specializes in US geopolitics and national security issues. During the Vietnam war, he was Dispatch News Services Bureau Chief in Saigon and later a co-director for the Indochina Resource Center. In addition to being a specialist in Vietnamese and Cambodian affairs, he has been reporting on the Middle East, including the chemical gas attacks reported in Syria, for the past decade. His numerous articles can found in Foreign Affairs, Al-Jazeera, Huffington, Counterpunch, Truthout, Consortium News and others. For the past 9 years he has been investigating US and Israeli tensions with Iran and US intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gareth has an MA in international relations from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University. He has published five major books dealing with Vietnam and Cambodia. His most recent is “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” published last year, which debunks the myths regarding Iran as a nuclear threat.

Trends This Week – World Markets Begin Global Meltdown – 01.06.16

The signs of global economic meltdown, which Gerald Celente and his Trends Research Institute have forecast for 2016, are multiplying, strengthening and deepening in the early days of the new year. Celente reviews the economic indicators that are weakening and converging to set the stage for Global Recession in 2016. One indicator after another, across the world’s major economies, are showing fundamental and deepening weakness. Further, geo-political tensions in the Middle-East, Asia and elsewhere are fueling instability. What can we expect? What can we do to prepare?

Progressive Commentary Hour – 01.05.16

Professor Peter Dale Scott is a former professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley (where he was also the co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program), a recognized national poet, a former Canadian diplomat and a scholar and author on the domestic and international political issues including taxation, war and conflict, the war on drugs, the politics of oil and the assassination of JFK. His life’s work has focused on his theory of “deep politics” — a descriptive, realistic way to objectively understand the evidence of coercive, unelected government, not accountable to the American public, which would otherwise be characterized as “conspiratorial” in the main stream media.

He is the author of many books including “The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on US Democracy” and more recently last autumn “Dallas 63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House” that looks at the activities of the CIA, FBI, and other entities behind the JFK assassination, and how this trend has continued through the Iran Contra scandal, 911 and beyond. His website is PeterDaleScott.net

It’s All About Food – Michael Bedar, Sweet Healing: A Whole Health Journey – 01.05.16

Part I: Michael Bedar, Sweet Healing: A Whole Health Journey

Michael Bedar is an avid natural foods and health researcher and author, and the Co-Director of the East Bay Healing Collective in Berkeley, California. He graduated from UC San Diego where he studied and researched Environmental Health. Later, for his master’s thesis at the Cousens School of Holistic Wellness, he surveyed 200 people on their happiness and satisfaction with their nutrition and health outcomes, and turned the data into a page-turner of a parable, the acclaimed novel, Sweet Healing: A Whole Health Journey. Learn more about Sweet Healing at www.readsweethealing.com. Bedar is also the Associate Producer of several hit documentaries about the natural world, food, and health. He has been a natural health guide for ten years.

Infectious Myth – Canada’s Indigenous Genocide with James Daschuk – 01.05.16

In Episode 84 David discusses the genocide of indigenous people in Canada with James Daschuk, an associate professor in the faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. Despite Canada’s reputation as a polite and kind society, its treatment of its native population is as shocking as in other colonizing nations. Recently Canada has completed an investigation into its residential schools, which were used to destroy native culture under the guise of providing a standard education, and that resulted in physical and sexual abuse, opportunities for biomedical experimentation, and even starvation. This led to the destruction of native families and a continuing cycle of dysfunctional families, alcoholism, drug abuse and imprisonment. Canada is also about to start an investigation into the shocking number of women, mostly indigenous, mostly poor, often drug addicts or sex workers, who disappeared without authorities bothering to search for them. The most notorious of these was the case of Robert Pickton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton), who confessed to killing 49 women in the Vancouver area. Finally, David and James delve into the history of the colonization of the prairies, the broken treaties, and the Indian Act that relegated natives to a child-like legal status, that James describes as apartheid.

You can find out more by reading Daschuk’s 2013 book “Clearing the Plains” that was a surprise bestseller in Canada and has won several awards: http://www.uofrpress.ca/publications/Clearing-The-Plains

Another surprise bestseller is the book of recollections of an elderly Cree man about growing up in a residential school, recommended by Daschuk: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/residential-school-survivors-memoir-details-decade-of-utter-cruelty/article23556082/

An article on biomedical experiments in the 1940s and 1950s that took advantage of the under-nourishment at residential schools, and even prolonged it, can be found at: https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/histoire_sociale_social_history/v046/46.91.mosby.html

Leid Stories – 01.05.16

Cops Gone Wild; Justice Gives Deep Cover
Developments in Chicago and South Carolina bring into sharp focus the national crisis of police killings of unarmed people. Overwhelmingly they have been, and tend to be, people of color, statistics show, and were killed, or are likely to be killed, by white officers who rarely are successfully prosecuted for their crimes. Leid Stories explains how the judicial system provides deep cover to rogue cops and why efforts at “reform” simply won’t touch the matter of criminal complicity by prosecutors and even judges in aiding and abetting injustice.