Do you have to choose between a healthy, fun, modern lifestyle and a fair, sustainable, compassionate lifestyle? No, you can have it all! Watch Making the Connection and decide for yourself. Making the Connection is a new film which invites you on a journey – together with a chef, a farmer, an MP, an athlete, a dietitian, a poet. Explores an exciting lifestyle which combines delicious, healthy food with tackling many of the global challenges facing us today. Will you make the connection and become part of the solution?

In 1996, in a documentary called The Money Masters, we asked the question why is America going broke. It wasn’t clear then that we were, but it is today. Now the question is how can we get out of this mess. Foreclosures are everywhere, unemployment is skyrocketing – and this is only the beginning. America’s economy is on a long, slippery slope from here on. The bubble ride of debt has come to an end. What can government do? The sad answer is – under the current monetary system – nothing. It’s not going to get better until the root of the problem is understood and addressed. There isn’t enough stimulus money in the entire world to get us out of this hole. Why? Debt. The national debt is just like our consumer debt – it’s the interest that’s killing us. Though most people don’t realize it the government can’t just issue it’s own money anymore. It used to be that way. The King could just issue stuff called money. Abraham Lincoln did it to win the Civil War. No, today, in our crazy money system, the government has to borrow our money into existence and then pay interest on it. That’s why they call it the National Debt. All our money is created out of debt. Politicians who focus on reducing the National Debt as an answer probably don’t know what the National Debt really is. To reduce the National Debt would be to reduce our money – and there’s already too little of that. The economy of the U.S. is in a deflationary spiral. Nothing can stop it — except monetary reform. 1. No more national debt. Nations should not be allowed to borrow. If they want to spend, they have to take the political heat right away by taxing. 2. No more fractional reserve lending. Banks can only lend money they actually have. 3. Gold money is NOT the answer. Historically gold ALWAYS works against a thriving middle class and ALWAYS works to create a plutocracy. 4. The total quantity of money + credit in a national system must be fixed, varying only with the population.

The Bethlem Royal Hospital in London became infamous in the 1600′s in regards to the inhumane and cruel treatment of its patients as revealed by psychiatric historians. Bedlam: The History of Bethlem Hospital reveals why Bedlam came to stand for the very idea of madness itself. It was satirized for centuries as both a human zoo and a university of madness and for 100 years was one of London’s leading tourist attractions, as Madame Tussauds is today. Britain’s leading psychiatric historians discuss Bedlam and its inhabitants as we reveal the incredible history of one of U.K’s most notorious institutions.

The Center for Inquiry-New York City and NYC Skeptics hosted noted skeptic and bestselling author Michael Shermer for a talk about his new book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. His thesis is straightforward: We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. We can’t help believing. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. Dr. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths and to insure that we are always right.

As the credit crunch continues to leave Britain cash-strapped and high street banks report huge losses, Dispatches investigates who is responsible for the current crisis. Reckless lending and risky investments have been blamed for directly driving up mortgage rates and increasing the numbers of people losing their homes. Dispatches investigates how the bank chiefs allowed this to happen and if lessons have been learn from the Northern Rock crisis. Former investment banker James Max tracks down the banking bosses who have presided over the colossal losses to see if they will be held to account. He examines the billion pound bonus culture and lifestyle of the City’s wide boys and investigates how the banks are now seeking to make back the money they lost before the credit boom hit the buffers. Featuring the results of an exclusive survey of bank lending rates, and how much money banks are re-claiming through them, the film also offers expert advice on how to cope with higher interest rates and shows how customers can take banking into their own hands.

In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert. But, as Susan Cain argues in this passionate talk, introverts bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world, and should be encouraged and celebrated.

Decades ago, we sent astronauts to the moon as a symbol of confidence in the face of the great cold war struggle. Landing on the moon was a giant leap for mankind. But it's what the astronauts picked up from the lunar surface that may turn out to be Apollo's greatest legacy. When the astronauts of Apollo stepped out of their landing craft, they entered a world draped in fine sticky dust, strewn with rocks, and pocked with craters. They walked and rambled about, picking up rocks that they packed for the return flight. Back in earth-bound labs, scientists went to work probing the rocks for clues to one of the most vexing questions in all of science. Where did the moon come from? The answer promised to shed light on an even grander question. Where did Earth come from? And how did it evolve into the planet we know today? The nature of the moon began to come into focus four centuries ago. Galileo Galilei had heard of an instrument built by Dutch opticians capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby." Galileo, in many ways the first modern scientist, saw this new instrument as a tool to help settle a long standing question. What was the nature of the heavens, and how did the world of men fit within it? To some philosophers, the moon was a perfect, crystalline sphere of divine substance, free of Earth's imperfections. Galileo, with his telescope, saw a more familiar reality. He noted mountains and valleys on the moon, features like those of Earth. The astronauts of Apollo lifted off on a series of missions to get a close up look at the moon and perhaps settle the debate. Because there's no atmosphere there, the astronauts entered landscapes that are nearly frozen in time. They could scour the lunar surface for evidence of events going back almost to the time of its birth. Indeed, eons of impacts had opened up the Moon's interior, leaving a wealth of information strewn about their landing sites. Scientists had already noticed that some large old craters were surrounded by concentric rings. You can see one of the most pronounced examples in this image of the Mare Orientale, captured recently by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. The colors show differences in elevation. The old view was that the impact had melted the rock below. A newer view held that the impactor had actually splashed down on a molten surface. That gave rise to the radical notion that, early in its history, the moon's surface was covered in a vast ocean of magma. When the astronauts arrived, they found relatively light rocks known as anorthosites. Their presence suggested that heavier material had sunk toward the moon's interior, forcing lighter material to the surface. The rocks they brought back were found to be strikingly similar to those on Earth, in part because they share forms of oxygen, called isotopes, that scientists regard as "blood types" for solar system bodies. Then there was this. The moon appeared to be completely, utterly, dry, with no evidence that water was ever present on its surface.

Penn Jillette rates the various candidates for the U.S. Presidency from the perspective of an atheist.

Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online – and who doesn’t? – are getting referred more and more to Wikipedia. For the past two years, this free online encyclopedia of the people has been topping the lists of the world’s most popular websites. But do we really know what we’re using? Backlight plunges into the story behind Wikipedia and explores the wonderful world of Web 2.0. Is it a revolution, or pure hype? Director IJsbrand van Veelen goes looking for the truth behind Wikipedia. Only five people are employed by the company, and all its activities are financed by donations and subsidies. The online encyclopedia that everyone can contribute to and revise is now even bigger than the illustrious Encyclopedia Britannica. Does this spell the end for traditional institutions of knowledge such as Britannica? And should we applaud this development as progress or mourn it as a loss? How reliable is Wikipedia? Do the people really hold the lease on wisdom? And since when do we believe that information should be free for all? In this film, “Wikipedians,” the folks who spend their days writing and editing articles, explain how the online encyclopedia works. In addition, the parties involved discuss Wikipedia’s ethics and quality of content. It quickly becomes clear that there are camps of both believers and critics.