Everyone needs access to high-quality health services, but health inequities persist. Societal attitudes among healthcare workers, advocates say, foster stigma and discrimination that discourage patients from seeking help.

Enter the “woke brigade.” In an effort to provide “culturally and linguistically-appropriate proficient health care delivery for our nation’s increasingly diverse population,” doctors, nurses and others are being trained in Cultural Sensitivity classes to use more better words.

Are Cultural Sensitivity programs effective or, as some studies have shown, can they be counterproductive and even create a hostile work environment? Are they actually a distraction from the real causes of unequal access to healthcare: poverty and health-insurance companies that routinely deny claims?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan have exclusively obtained documents from a Cultural Sensitivity program now in widespread use in a US hospital system. Join us as we explore the role of language training in a medical workplace.

Rather than be followed by the expressions of sympathy and shock one might usually expect, the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York was also greeted with ridicule and even approval by a substantial portion of the public. Worried that copycat killers might take that response as a cue to replicate the alleged actions of accused shooter Luigi Mangione, CEOs and their companies are reconsidering their security measures.

With the Inauguration days away, how does this inform the security landscape for that high-profile event? Are CEOs paranoid or are they really at increased risk now? What can they and ordinary people worried about their personal security do to make themselves safer?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask these questions to security expert Mark Ledlow, a former US Marine and founder of Ledlow Security.

Like many Americans, TMI Show co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan have deep ties to Los Angeles. Manila grew up in metro LA and still considers herself a Californian. Ted was a talk show host at KFI AM 640 Los Angeles and the staff cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times. Join Manila and Ted as they discuss the long-term repercussions of the wildfires that continue to scorch the nation’s biggest city.

As the drought continues and the climate continues to change in a place that never had many water resources to begin with, can we adapt, or is it time to consider forcible population shifts away from California? Should the federal government assist Californians who lose multi-million dollar homes but can’t get insurance? How do we define a tipping point after which a place is no longer suitable for human habitation?