Independent Commentary Episodes
Feb. 1, 2021
San Francisco Noir: America's Bad Dream
San Francisco has been picked on by the East Coast press for decades. Of late, they have criticized us for our homelessness mess, high cost of housing, City Hall Corruption - I agree with them on that score - and the recent …
Jan. 20, 2021
Was 2020 or 1968 the worst year ever ? The Past is Prologue.
As awful as 2020 has been been, 1968 was even more momentous with political assassinations, the Viet Nam War, the Prague Spring and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as well as major civil unrest throughout America. Amidst a…
Dec. 19, 2020
Newsom Recall: Danger Signals Flash Red.
Governor Gavin Newsom, California's 40th Governor could be facing a recall election in the Spring of 2021 in the midst of the Pandemic. Recall signature gatherers have 850,000 of the 1,500,000 qualified signatures they need …
Nov. 21, 2020
JFK Conspiracies: Fact, Fiction or Fantasy ?
November 22, 2020 marks 57 years since the assassination of the 35th President, John F. Kennedy. Yet key documents remain hidden from the public including 300 pages of files on George Joannides, a CIA operative who managed …
Oct. 28, 2020
Violence Post Election: Burn Baby Burn
2020 has been marked by extreme political polarization in the United States, and civilian unrest in most American cities. 56% of Americans polled expect political violence to follow the November 3rd presidential election reg…
Oct. 5, 2020
California's Wildfire Apocalypse: a Moonshot Solution
The quickening pace of the destruction of California's forests by wildfire is staggering. In the last 3 months four million acres of our 33 million acres of forest have burned. That's 12%. From 2000 to 2019 4 million acres b…
Sept. 20, 2020
San Francisco's Deathly Compassion.
San Francisco's homeless population numbers approximately 24,000. It breaks down into three discrete segments, namely one third mentally ill, one third economic casualties and one third drug users and addicts. Today's podcas…
Sept. 15, 2020
Hate Studies : Why we need to learn about Hate.
Gonzaga University's Institute of Hate Studies, located in Spokane, Washington is a center focused on understanding the roots of Hate in the public square and working to eradicate it. The ADL's Pyramid of Hate is a graphic v…
Sept. 7, 2020
The Pacific North West: a center of Hate ?
The recent murder of right wing Patriot Prayer member Jay Danielson by Antifa activist Michael Reinoehl on the streets of Portland, was a dangerous escalation in the street protests of this Summer. Reinoehl was subsequently …
Aug. 24, 2020
Qanon, Conspiracy Theories and the Republicans
Qanon is a right wing conspiracy movement with a formidable Social Media presence on Twitter, Facebook and several bulletin board sites like 4Chan, 8Chan and 8kun . Its' theories have been embraced by many Republicans and …
Aug. 10, 2020
Implicit Bias and Principled Policing: Does it work ?
Science tells us that 95% of the population has implicit biases yet there is only a 16% correlation between the bias and behavior. So is racist, homophobic and misogynistic behavior not principally triggered by implicit bias…
Aug. 3, 2020
2084: Was George Orwell's novel 1984, one hundred years ahead of itself ?
Mass surveillance and totalitarianism are two prominent themes in Orwell's dystopian novel published in 1949. But there are two major mass surveillance systems at play in the world today. In the West, the data mining strateg…
July 26, 2020
Science deniers keep schools closed.
California’s powerful teachers’ union the CTA and Governor Gavin Newsom seem to be taking a very slow and hesitant approach to reopening the state’s schools. He has announced that online learning rather than in person classr…
July 16, 2020
The Coming Population Bust
The world's population stands at 7.8 billion today and has increased by 5.8 billion since 1950. But the British medical journal The Lancet and the University of Washington in Seattle have authored a study which posits that t…
July 6, 2020
Spanish Missions: The Spine of Modern California
35 million Californians live within 50 miles of one of the 21 historic Franciscan Missions: They are a key part of the California identity. But the recent destruction of statues of Father Junipero Serra, have challenged the …