The Gary Null Show – 09.25.15

Prof. Lisa Miller is a professor of clinical psychology and the Director of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College. She is also the founder of the Spirituality Mind-Body Institute at Columbia and the co-editor in chief of the journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice published by the American Psychological Association. For the past 20 years Prof. Miller has been conducting scientific research on the integration of spirituality with mental health and wellness, and has published almost 100 peer-reviewed papers on the subject. She has degrees from Yale University and received her doctorate in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Lisa is the author of the recent book “The Spiritual Child: The New Science of Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving” which is accumulation of many years of research providing a sound basis supporting the important role spirituality play in human development. Her website is LisaMillerPhd.com

Leid Stories – 09.18.15

Got Something to Say? Say It on ‘Free Your Mind Friday!’

It’s been quite a week. No doubt you have something to say about the issues and events that made the headlines. Or, maybe you’d like to share your thoughts about something altogether different. Either way, there’s plenty of room for your information, opinions and ideas on Leid Stories’ “free Your Mind Friday,” the world’s greatest open forum.

Yessenia Funes – Hero or Coward: Could Skipping My Student Loan Payments Start a Revolution?

Every college semester, I filled out my financial aid application, hoping I would receive more grants than loans. Either way, my fate was sealed: I was a college student in the United States, so debt was inevitable. The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Education are for 2012–13, my second year in college. That year, tuition, room, and board …

Chinese cave ‘graffiti’ tells a 500-year story of climate change and impact on society

An international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Cambridge, has discovered unique ‘graffiti’ on the walls of a cave in central China, which describes the effects drought had on the local population over the past 500 years. The information contained in the inscriptions, combined with detailed chemical analysis of stalagmites in the cave, together paint an intriguing …

Chris Hedges – Evoking the Wrath of Nature

MOUNT WASHINGTON, N.H.—The wind on the peak of Mount Washington—the East Coast’s highest point, where some of the most erratic and treacherous weather in the world occurs—reached 60 miles an hour the day I was there with my family. Backpackers huddled in the biting chill next to large boulders or congregated in the lobby of a snack bar and gift …

Nearly 2,500 Bridges to Nowhere: Congress Considers Expanding Charter Program Despite Millions Wasted on Closed Schools – Jonas Persson

As both the House and the Senate consider separate bills that would reauthorize and expand the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year Charter Schools Program (CSP), the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has examined more than a decade of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as documentation from open records requests. The results are troubling. Between 2001 and 2013, 2,486 charter schools have …

The Native American Genocide and the Teaching of US History

When the term “genocide” is uttered in mainstream school environments, it usually refers to the Jewish Holocaust, or to other genocides committed in the 20th century: Turkey, Stalin’s Russia, Nanking, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But in many US classrooms, the United States is left out of the list of countries where genocide has occurred. And so, when the College Board decided …

The Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education

The great under-reported crime against education by corporate America is not the buying and selling of schools by for-profit corporations; that this is a significant threat to education is indubitable and well-documented. But the little-discussed threat to education is the deliberate “hollowing-out” of education from within—i.e. by the philosophy which views education, especially at and up through the community-college level, …