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.

Humans began altering natural world 6,000 years ago

Scientists have found an abrupt change about 6,000 years ago in how terrestrial plant and animal species coexisted, right about the time human populations were ballooning and agriculture was spreading around the world. The findings suggest that human activity had reached a tipping point where hunting and farming were impacting the natural world in irreversible ways — changes that have …

Justin Gardner – Police Depts in the US Have a KKK Problem – They’ve Long Been Infiltrated – Denying it Won’t Help

Los Angeles, Ca — In 1991, a neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang was terrorizing the streets of Lynwood in Los Angeles County. The reason these violent thugs could run amok was because they were deputies at the Lynwood Sheriff’s station, having the power of blue privilege. A federal judge acknowledged that the gang of deputies carried out “systematic acts of shooting, …

Kate Essig – Activism Or Slacktivism? How Social Media Hurts And Helps Student Activism

On Oct. 1, 1964, hundreds of University of California-Berkeley students surrounded a police car to protest the arrest of a student. Students stood on top of the car to deliver speeches and sing, “We Shall Overcome,” to a crowd that grew to include roughly two thousand students. Years later, on Nov. 21, 2013, students gathered in Saint Louis University’s student …

Young adults are more envious than their elders—and about more things

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall – who’s the fairest of them all?” New research doesn’t have an answer to that. But it does give clues as to who is the “enviest” and would have been more likely to pester (and fester) with the question in the first place: Snow White, not her stepmother. If only fairy tales lined up with …

Progressive Commentary Hour – 11.03.15

Dr. Bruce Lipton is an international authority on the new emerging biology into cellular activity and on the interface between science and spirituality. From 1987 to 1992 he was a researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine. Among his discoveries was identifying a mechanism in cells that function like a brain and the founding of a field of cellular biology known as epigenetics. Dr. Lipton is now recognized as one of the leading voices in the New Biology and Mind-Body Medicine. A decade ago, Bruce’s book “The Biology of Belief” became a landmark work uniting mind-body and cellular science with spirituality and introduced his and others’ latest discoveries in molecular biology, quantum physics and the emerging field of epigenetics. Bruce’s other books include “Spontaneous Evolution” and “The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth.” You can learn more about Bruce and his appearances at his website: BruceLipton.com

Chris Hedges – Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” and “Politics and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind …

Declines in whales, fish, seabirds and large animals disrupt Earth’s nutrient cycle

Giants once roamed the earth. Oceans teemed with ninety-foot-long whales. Huge land animals–like truck-sized sloths and ten-ton mammoths–ate vast quantities of food, and, yes, deposited vast quantities of poop. A new study shows that these whales and outsized land mammals–as well as seabirds and migrating fish–played a vital role in keeping the planet fertile by transporting nutrients from ocean depths …