The Final Straw Radio

This week William got the chance to speak to Bruno Renero-Hannan , who is an anarchist historical anthropologist from Mexico City, about their solidarity work around two of the original 250 Loxicha Prisoners in the state of Oaxaca. This rebellion and imprisonment occurred almost simultaneously to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in the mid-late 90s with very different results. We talk about the...

Interview with a member of the Youth Movement of Rojava This week, Bursts spoke with Şoreş Ronahi of the Youth Movement of Rojava (Yekîtiya Ciwanên Rojava), an autonomous movement within Tev-Dem, the movement for Democratic Confederalism in Rojava (located within Northern Syria).    Mr Ronahi speaks about the Turkish assaults, aided by ISIS/DAESH forces now flying the so-called Free Syrian Army fl...

This Week's Content First, we air a portion of Ursula K. Le Guin's acceptance speech from the 2014 National Book Awards, where she received the Lifetime Acheivement award.  Ursula K. Le Guin, wrote fantasy and sci-fi for 77 years of her life, contributing many books such as The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest & The Earthsea Series.  She died on Monday, January...

This week on the Final Straw, we air two interviews. In the first segment, we hear from two organizers with the Centro de Apoyo Mutuo or Mutual Aid Center in Caguas, Puerto Rico. Emilu and Kique talk about Caguas, about the colonial relationship between the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico, the post-hurricane disaster relief they've been doing as a continuation of social organizing in the wake of tha...

Enough is Enough spoke with many refugees during their visit to Lesvos, and The Final Straw is happy to release this interview. Here we will hear from Amin (his name was changed for safety), a Pakistani man detained for 9 months for absolutely nothing. He went to the registration office of the Moria camp to renew his papers, something refugees have to do regularly. Instead of new papers he was sud...

This week, Bursts had a change to speak with two participants in the L'eu Est La Vie camp (Water is Life in French) organizing against the Bayou Bridge pipeline that Energy Transfer Partners is trying to push through the swamps of Louisiana at the tail end of the Dakota Access Pipeline.  For the hour, they speak about the pipeline, the lifeways of people living in the bayou, potential impacts on t...

Operation Push This week, Disembodied Voice spoke with Karen, a member of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee in Gainesville, Florida.  People imprisoned across the state of Florida are gearing up for a work strike and boycott of prison profit centers such as commissary beginning on January 15, and the Gainesville IWOC chapter has been a crucial node of support on the outside.   DV spoke...

This week on error451 , the occasionally-weekly tech podcast from an anarchist perspective brought to you by The Final Straw Radio, Bursts and William Budington chat about devices crossing the U.S. border.  Now, neither of us are lawyers and situations change according to laws, precedence and actual practice with border security, so consider these better practice suggestions. We talk about full di...

This week William and Disembodied Voice had the chance to interview Walidah Imarisha, who is an Oregon based writer, educator, public scholar and spoken word artist about her book Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption , her 2016 book out from AK Press and IAS, which highlights three distinct experiences that are all in different degrees tangential to the realities...

  This week, the show features two interviews. Anti-Fascist Organizing in Charlotte Against AntiCom The first is with an antifascist in Charlotte, NC, about the "March Against Communism" event that MIGHT be taking place in that city on Thursday, December 28 th . Anticommunist Action , the nazi group that originally announced the event had hoped to hold it in Marshall Park but never applied for a p...

Today William talked with two anarchist healthcare workers in Asheville, NC about the Trump administration's censorship of language regarding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 2018 budget proposal documents. In this short episode we talk about what this means, some recent context for similar censorship, how CDC budget documents affect people's everyday lives, and recommendations for...

  DefendJ20 Updates on 1st Trial Block For the hour, we spoke with Betty Rothstein of DefendJ20Resistance and Jude Ortiz of DefendJ20Resistance and the Titled Scales Collective , about how the case is going as this first trial group finishes up it's defense and the prosecution fires it's last shots. This conversation was recorded on Friday, 12/15/17 after the final arguments in the case of the fir...

This week, Bursts was joined by Pat Boyle, a collective member at Unicorn Riot (more about them later in this post), radical independent media project.  We chatted about crypto-currency, Bitcoin in particular, technologies and strategies involved in the implementation of crypto-currency, recent comings to light of increased wealth coming via Bitcoin into the hands of far right racists and ecologic...

Interview with RAM-NYC This week we spoke with members of The Base, which is an anarchist space in New York City, about the newly formed Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement NYC Community Bail Fund. In this episode we talk about the concept of bail and its origins, what folks have happen to them from the moment of arrest to the moment bail is set, what it means to have an explicitly abolitionist ba...

This week, William Budington chats with Bursts about the recent exposé published by Yael Grauer at The Intercept about research by Exodus and Yale Research Group leading to the findings that hundreds of common apps available from the Android Google Play Store contain clandestine tracking apps, allowing for the scooping up of the data a phone user gives off throughout their use of the device.  Ever...

This week we feature two segments. Prison-Related Audio Roundtable The first is a roundtable discussion with producers from various audio projects around North America that focus on prisoner struggles and amplifying incarcerated voices. In the chat you'll hear from me, two producers of The Prison Radio show on CFRC radio in Kingston, Ontario, a producer of the Prison Radio Show on CKUT from McGill...

This week on the occasionally-weekly tech podcast from The Final Straw, Error451 , Bursts and guest William Budington , a tech security expert, talk about Net Neutrality .  The context is that it's back in the news as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai appears to be pushing for the revocation of the 2015 FCC decision to declare the Internet a Title II public utility in U.S. law.  The upside of this is that acc...

Interview with Eleanor Goldfield This week we spoke with Eleanor Goldfield, who is an activist on the far left and a proponent of creative activism, a stance that centers creative approaches to direct action with the aim of leading people to interrogate their own politics on an emotional and psychological level. From her website :  "Creative Activism is outreach and change through the mediums that...

In perfect timing for holiday driving many will be doing in the U.S., we're releasing episode 3 of Error451 , The Final Straw's occasionally weekly tech security podcast with William Budington . This episode is about GPS navigation on mobile devices and ways to use it without disclosing your information to service providers.   Oh, hand here's a link to one of those Motherboard chat logs about Mr....

  This week on the Final Straw we feature 2 interviews. Walid, an asylum seeker held at the Manus Regional Process Center, Papua New Guinea First up, you'll hear a conversation that Bursts had with a refugee seeking asylum in Australia. His name is Walid, he is 24 years old and from Afghanistan. Manus Regional Processing Centre , where Walid is being held alongside nearly 450 other men, is a facil...

This is the first standalone episode of Error451 ,  The Final Straw's occasionally weekly podcast featuring a conversation between Bursts and William Budington about tech, security and safer practices.  Upcoming episodes include how to avoid leaking info while using maps on your device and safer practices at borders.  If you have other topics you'd like to see covered, drop us a line at thefinalst...

Anti-Repression Panel from Denver, October 2017 This week we are featuring a recording from an Anti-Repression panel that took place in Denver in October of this year. The sound quality is affected by a fan system that the venue had running, but the words are well worth hearing. For the hour, we'll hear words from a few perspectives of resistance in the U.S. currently. First, we hear from Danica f...

In mid October, Bursts and Sole sat down at Sole's Colorado Villa by the family grotto and chatted over some bubbly water.  In the hour they spoke about: CZN and its aspirations J20 Repression Political prisoner support Why the Anarchist Black Cross is so awesome The Situationists and folk traditions In music Science fiction books we are geeking out on Much more! You can find more work by Sole at...

For a 59 minute long, radio clean version for syndication purposes, please visit the archive.org collection . Cascadia Forest Defenders This week William had the opportunity to speak with someone who works closely with the group Cascadia Forest Defenders, which is based around Eugene Oregon. This crew has been opposing logging in the Willamette National Forest, and was recently driven out of the c...

Airs on WSFM-LP 103.3 in Asheville / streaming at AshevilleFM from 3am EST on October 30th through November 5th, 2017 and podcasting on libsyn.com. For a 59 minute long, radio clean version for syndication purposes, please visit the archive.org collection . This week, we share a conversation that Bursts had with Betsy Raasch-Gilman. Betsy is a lifelong Quaker, feminist and anti-capitalist. She tal...