The Final Straw Radio

This week we have two interviews to share. In the first Bursts spoke with two organizers of the Asheville Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (ACAB2018) taking place the 22-24th of June. To link up with this project and for aaall the information, you can visit the website here! To follow on social media, you find @acab.2018 on Instagram, and for email it's acab2018@riseup.net . This begins at [11:...

A change of plans: instead of airing the interview with comrades in Yogyakarta about May Day repression of anarchists there, we're including that in the radio show for next Sunday.  So, instead, kick back with this new issue of #Error451 ! The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) got passed by the U.S. Congress earlier this year and signed into law by President Trump.  It's a rev...

Cory Doctorow on Post-Scarcity & Sci-Fi This week, we present an interview that Bursts conducted with the sci-fi and picture book author, technologist and social critic Cory Doctorow .  Cory is an editor of the blog BoingBoing , a fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and his most recent book is entitled Walkaway, out from Head of Zeus and TOR books.  The novel plays with themes of open sou...

This week on Error451, William Budington and Bursts chat about the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal.  We've seen Congressional hearings and M. Zuckerburg give testimony, we've seen punditry, we've seen evasion. For the episode, the two chat about what's going on with the hullabaloo and different solutions privacy advocates have proposed. Check out past episodes of Error451 and hit us up if...

This week, we are excited to share with y'all an interview with TL, the main artist and designer of Bloc by Bloc: The Game of Insurrection. From the website of Out Of Order games , which publishes the game, "Bloc by Bloc is a semi-cooperative strategy board game inspired by 21st century riots and revolutions. The game features hidden agendas, deep strategy, area control, asymmetrical player abilit...

Sunday, May 20th from 14:00-22:00 Central European Time (UTC+1), so 8am North Carolina time, get ready for HOURS of anarchist audio from around the world with participants in the A-Radio Network, producers of B(A)DNews.  Find the stream soon at this facebook page.  Projects will include: A-Radio Berlin 98fm Athens Motbrus Dissident Island The Final Straw Bilda Kedjor Ex-Worker InfoLora Radio-A Kar...

This week, we are airing a conversation that William had a few weeks ago with Wriply Bennet and Ashley Braxton, two members of the Black Pride 4. The Black Pride 4 are four black queer and trans people with accomplices who were arrested during a Pride parade on June 17, 2017. The four werearrested after leading a silent protest that obstructed the Stonewall Columbus Pride parade in downtown Columb...

Welcome to the 8th anniversary podcast mini-sode special! The Final Straw has an irregular tradition of using our anniversary to air conversations with other projects that produce anarchist media. In past episodes, linked in the notes for this special, you can find chats from past anniversaries. This time around, we are featuring two interviews. First, you'll hear audio from the regular host of th...

This week I had the chance to speak to Ricchi, who is a Puerto Rican anarchist, about an autonomous squatted community center in Borique called Valle Garita. In this episode, we talk about the squatted space and the intentions of the organizers, plus the cultural context of squatting, reactions of the police, landlord, and bank, and some concrete asks for solidarity and support from non locals. We...

For this May Day episode William had the chance to speak with Nutty, who has been holding down a monopod blockade which is blocking the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the renamed Hellbender Autonomous Zone. She has been without the ability to reup her food and water supplies for over 21 days due to cop and forest ranger interference. We get to speak about the monopod and her exper...

This week's installment of #error451 podcast, Bursts and William Budington speak about facial recognition technology.  We chat about how different methods are employed, scanning of social media by police and security forces, different methods used to avoid it such as camouflage, lights, makeup and masks, the Google Arts & Culture app comparing people's selfies to the contents of art museums and mo...

This week on Error451, William Budington and Bursts chat about eavesdropping by digital devices.  This conversation happened before the Cambridge Analytica & Facebook scandal, but covers some of the same material.  Do Facebook, Amazon, Google and other big data companies listen through your device to your conversations and target marketing at you based on your choices?  What tools do platforms lik...

This week we share as our main feature an interview with longtime anarchist, musician, anti-racist & organizer from Texas, scott crow. scott is the author of numerous books, including " Black Flags & Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective " & " Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams: A scott crow Reader ". At the end of 2017, PM Press published " Setting Sights: Histories and Reflect...

25 Years After Lucasville: Two Perspectives on the Uprising This week is the 25th anniversary of the longest prison uprising in US history in which lives were lost.  The rebellion, which lasted 11 days, took place at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, more commonly know as "Lucasville," in April 1993.  The disturbance broke out on L Block, which housed over 400 people.  Over the course of th...

Bursts spoke with a comrade y'all might recognize, a Camille who lives on the ZAD, or Zone To Defend in Notre Dame De Landes, Britanny, France. Camille and Bursts spoke in January upon the announcement of the French government's decision to cancel the building of an airport to replace the one in Nantes. After literally decades of struggle, and nearly a decade of squatting and on and off fighting o...

This week, we have a few goodies for y'all! First, we'll feature some words that friends in central NC recorded of Elijah . Elijah was born and raised in Durham, NC, who was imprisoned in Alabama. Elijah was among many who showed up to resist a threatened march in Durham by the KKK after people began rising up and taking down white supremacist statues last falls. Elijah talks about incarceration,...

In this week's episode of The Final Straw Radio, we have three segments on two subjects. This week there'll be no Sean Swain segment due to technical difficulties, but we hope to be hearing his clarion call towards dancing around the ashes of swivelization next week. In part one, I spoke with Friday, a former J20 defendant and a supporter of the remaining 59 facing charges. We talk about the arres...

Hebron Documentary This week we got the chance to speak with Yousef Natsha, who is a Palestinian filmmaker and activist about his new documentary called Hebron . In this interview we talk about how he got into making this documentary, some historical and present day context for this series of struggles in Hebron City, and some suggestions for action. You can learn more about Yousef, see more of hi...

For this week's episode, Bursts spoke with Ray Luc Levasseur,  longtime activist, Vietnam War vet, revolutionary and former political prisoner in the U.S. Ray was a reputed founder of the Sam Melville / Jonathan Jackson Unit, later known as the United Freedom Front which conducted sabotage, expropriations and attacks against profiteers and symbols of American Imperialism and oppression abroad. Aft...

In this podcast special, I spoke with Antti , Antti is a member of Moscow Anarchist Black Cross, which does anti-repression work for anarchists and anti-authoritarian antifascists. Many members of Moscow ABC are now living abroad and doing their work from there due to intense repression by the government of Russia and it's client states. For March 11-18 there has been a call out for international...

Interview with Michael about the recent WV Teacher's Strike In this interview, Bursts spoke with an anarchist teacher and IWW labor organizer in West Virginia , Michael Mochaidean, about the work that went into the recent teacher strikes that went slightly Wild Cat and ended in a partial victory for the teachers after 12 days of walk outs by public school teachers across the state and has inspired...

The Final Straw is excited to share with our listeners an episode of the podcast, Shades of Green , which describes itself as "a podcast exploring environmental justice from unceded Mi'kmaq territory." (correction to our intro, we say "liquified natural gas", when in fact the facility would just store "natural gas."  Apologies for the confusion.) This episode features voices of the Mi'kmaq resista...

Main Interview: Stop The MVP and All Pipelines! (at ~ 16min, 38sec) This week, Bursts spoke with Birch and Judy, two folks involved in the Tree Sits on Peter Mountain along the Appalachian Trail on the border of Virginia and West Virginia.  The tree sits are operating in order to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline or MVP.  Before all of the permits have been ok'd, contractors with the help of loca...

Kristian Williams on George Orwell This week on The Final Straw, Bursts presents a conversation with Kristian Williams about his recently published book, Between The Lie & The Bullet: Essays on Orwell , published by AK Press . Kristian is maybe best known for authoring Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America . For the hour we speak about Kristian's reading of Orwell, the importance of int...

This episode contains three segments: Move 9 Parole "Stare Into The Lights My Pretties" Anarcho-Syndicalist Organizing in Kosovo MOVE9 Parole First, there's the interview that Bursts held with Michael Davis Africa Jr., a member of the MOVE organization.  MOVE is a Philadelphia-based black liberation group founded by John Africa in 1972. The group lives communally. During the conversation, Michael...