Episode 1435
Dirty energy politics in Ohio / Nathanael Johnson
Feb 7 2022
The scenarios are the companies will come in. There'll be news splashes. ‘Yeah, we've got an investor to do this and all that.’ And then now what follows is the issue of violating human rights in communities later on. And of course, government is always like, ‘We didn't know that this is not what we agreed on’. When it comes to corporates investors… international investors… coming to these communities and the government will condemn probably, but then they'll be like, ‘that is not what you agreed on’. But then unfortunately, the violations has already happened. So for the two correlations, I haven't really had them differ on this issue per se, but of course we've had a few politicians,bring up the issue and talk about it, you know?
Nelly Madegwa is co-author of The Intercept story supported by the Pulitzer Center, "Where There Is Salt: An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates", which she co-wrote with Georgia Gee.
Nelly is an award-winning journalist from Kenya whose reporting covers climate change, sustainable development, health, and human rights across Africa. She writes frequently from a gender perspective on issues ranging from public health to sexual violenceHer work has appeared in The Elephant, Minority Africa, taz, and Africa Uncensored. Her storytelling blends investigative and data-driven reporting... read more
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Feb 3 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the wooden stake that is the hammer. Very difficult to use.
It snuck up on us one day while we were listening to Pete Seeger and reading the diary of Anne Frank, and listening to Bessie Smith and reading Edward Said, and listening to Chumbawamba and reading Frantz Fanon. The agents of rot swarmed in. They came at night. They used the silence and darkness to conceal their purpose and their protocols.
Or, maybe it was obvious. You were listening to Martin Luther King, Jr. inspiring you to action against the smug, violent, comfortable bosses, leaders, and owners. The FBI and the Ku Klux Klan could be plainly seen hovering around him, making threats that had nowhere to go but into execution. And then he was killed. Everyone was getting assassinated except the people who really needed assassinating. They were cruisin’ for an assassinatin’. They were clammoratin’ for an assassinatin’. They were dunning for a gunning. But they never got it. Only the decent people did, plus John F. Kennedy.
Rachel Carson, Joe Hill, W.E.B. du Bois, Jacques Cousteau, Virginia Wolfe, Malcolm X, Eugene V. Debs, Shirley Chisholm, Fanny Lou Hamer, Ho Chi Minh, did they all live in vain? Were they all killed by werewolves? The current thinking is that they were. Were they all killed by the same werewolf? Current theories say, “probably.” Does that mean they all live on as werewolves now? Yes. E.O. Wilson recently became a werewolf, in case you missed it.
What exactly is a werewolf? A lot of ignorant people will try to tell you. On a podcast called “Supernatural,” a not-very-persuasive voice named Ashley Flowers tried and did a crap job. She began by asserting that “we always cast extremely attractive men to play them in movies, like Michael J Fox, Hugh Jackman, and Taylor Lautner.”
Okay, Michael J. Fox was in Teen Wolf. Taylor Lautner was in that Twilight garbage. Hugh Jackman? Is she mistaking Wolverine for a werewolf because of his suggestive facial hair? No, right, he was a werewolf in Van Helsing. I didn’t remember that either.
The writer of that first clause, “We always cast extremely attractive men to play them in movies,” must have a pop culture memory the depth of Zambonied fruit leather. The original actor to play the Universal pictures wolfman was Lon Chaney, Jr., not a glamorous ingenu by any measure. Actually, downright... read more
Feb 3 2022
Jan 31 2022