Angry Planet

We’re taking another look at the climate here at Angry Planet. This week we’re joined by Peter Kalmus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Talking to a scientist about how hot the planet is getting can be jarring. Kalmus, like other experts in the field, brings a sense of doom to the subject that fits perfectly in the Angry Planet cannon. Kalmus talks about dining with oil executives and shares his thoughts on How to Blow Up a Pipeline. We cover a lot of ground in this episode and we’re happy to have our listeners along for the ride. Next week we’ll try to get back to something more traditionally depressing like Ramzan Kadyrov or Armenia and Azerbaijan. Check out Peter’s research here. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mysterious producer Kevin Knodell comes on to Angry Planet this week to tell us about his recent reporting trip to Maui. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On July 26, a military junta deposed and imprisoned Niger’s duly elected president, Mohamed Bazoum. You are probably saying three things—perhaps all at the same time: Where the hell is Niger? Who is Bazoum? Why the fuck would I care? That’s what this episode is all about. We answer those three questions and fill you in on the context around the event as well as the region where it happened, the Sahel, which is where Saharan Africa meets sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a place that’s at the mercy of natural disasters like severe drought and extreme flooding, and human disasters like mismanagement of the land and laws, jihadists, and just plain bandits. Aneliese Bernard joins us and knows what she’s talking about to a simply frightening degree. When not slumming on podcasts like ours, Bernard is director at Strategic Stabilization Advisors and Director of Research and Programs at Elva Community Engagement, and formerly worked in the Sahel with the U.S. State Department. She’s not a spy. She said so herself. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christopher Atwood returns to the show this week to talk about a report he helped write for at the New Lines Institute. It’s an in-depth analysis of Russia’s ongoing genocide in Ukraine. Here’s a link to the report: The Russian Federation’s Escalating Commission of Genocide in Ukraine: A Legal Analysis Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Cirincione is back on the podcast this week to walk us through the science of nuclear weapons and give us his preliminary thoughts on Oppenheimer. Cirincione is a national security analyst and author with over 40 years of experience. He’s been a congressional staffer, a program director, a philanthropist, an advisor the the State Department and three presidential campaigns. Now, he writes at a substack. He’s recently completed a six part series detaling the history of the nuclear world. Get started on it by clicking below. https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/history-of-the-nuclear-world-part Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freelance journalist Kelsey Atherton joins Angry Planet to talk about Oppenheimer. The movie does a good, but not perfect, job with history and tends toward mythmaking. Matthew loved it and Atherton had some issues with it. In this wide-ranging conversation that covers nuclear history, our renewed atomic fears, and the people left out of the story, the two nuclear journalists dissect Hollywood’s latest blockbuster. The People Building AI with 'Existential Risk' Are Really Not Getting 'Oppenheimer' We Are All Oppenheimer Atherton’s Wars of the Future Past 12 Books and Movies to Check Out After 'Oppenheimer' What ‘Oppenheimer’ doesn’t tell you about atomic bombs Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you’re talking about disasters, natural and manmade, it’s always the first responders—soldiers, police, EMTs—who get all the credit. But what about the people who not only support the first responders, but who help people once the front line has moved on? On this show, we talk a lot about wars and weapons and such. We talk about geopolitics and strategy. We rarely talk about people who are working to make things just that little bit better. Today we’re changing that in the case of Ukraine. We’re going to talk about humanitarian efforts and what’s happening to people—not just soldiers—on the ground. Joining us are Britta Ellwanger of For Peace and Nelli Isaieva of Helping to Leave. Their efforts, and the efforts of those they work with make a huge difference in people’s lives in Ukraine, getting civilians and soldiers the aid they need when they need it, but also helping people get out of some pretty sticky situations using mostly the power of the mobile phone. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this subscribers only episode of Angry Planet, Kremlin expert Mark Galeotti comes on to walk us through the military and political machinations of Russia’s “adhocracy.” According to Galeotti, Russia is a modern state that’s run by a Medieval court. He walks us through the implications of the Wagner mutiny, the different court players, and what the future of Putin’s court might be. Here’s Mark’s piece in The Economist that details Putin’s “self inflicted wounds.” Mark’s excellent podcast In Moscow’s Shadows is avaiable everywhere. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nobody outside of the Kremlin—and maybe inside the Kremlin, too—knows exactly what happened over the last weekend. We do know that Yevgeny Prigozhin led something that looked like a rebellion against Vladimir Putin’s government. Columns of troops and tanks turned toward the motherland and elements of the Wagner Group made it inside of 200 miles from Moscow. What did Prigozhin really want? And what happened to end the crisis? And is the crisis really over? Joining us today is Mark Katz of George Mason University. He’s a longtime Russia watcher and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, in addition to his teaching duties. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is well under way. One of the best places to go to get stories and reporting about what’s happening is counteroffensive.news, a substack run by former U.S. Army Medic and NPR investigative journalist Tim Mak. He’s here with us today to talk about the war, the counteroffensive, and the charms of Kyiv. This is my mom’s brain on Russian propaganda French fighter for Ukraine, musing about God, heads to the frontlines; update on early counteroffensive She secretly sneaks to the frontlines to feed cats and dogs in the ruins of her city Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The results of Turkey's presidential election are finally in and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had been forced into a runoff against his chief opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, gets to keep his job as leader of NATO’s most troublesome member. Were the elections free and fair? Meh, says Foreign Policy/Council on Foreign Relations expert Steven Cook. This week he joins us to wrap up one of the world’s most anticipated elections—even if the suspense was never more than mild. Erdogan isn’t either a benevolent dictator or a tyrant. He's an authoritarian of his own flavor—and at least 52 percent of Turks can’t get enough of it. In the 20 years he's been in power, he's mostly been a man for his moment, mixing Islamist beliefs with strong ties to at least military modernity. Before the May 28 vote, the 69-year-old had won many elections—by a lot. He was a popular reformist mayor of Turkey’s largest and most storied city, Istanbul. He did so well there that he and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, AKP, moved up to the national stage. So, Steven, what’s next for Erdogan and the rest of the world that has to deal with him? Listen to the show to find out. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

World War II is still killing people. Unexploded ordnance, the remnants of globe spanning conflict, litters the fields of Europe and the waters of the Pacific. The world spends a lot of money and time cleaning up UX in Europe and helping its victims. In the Pacific? Well, there it’s a different story. Especially in the Solomon Islands. Thomas Heaton is a reporter for Civil Beat and the author of its ‘Lethal Legacy’ series, which focuses on the devastation World War II is still wreaking in the Pacific. Civil Beat’s Lethal Legacy series. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s 2023. It’s time for authoritarian leaders to update their aesthetic. Sure a stuffy military uniform used to lend an air of authority, but today’s young leaders are looking more and more like silicon valley tech billionaires. A backwards baseball cap. Laser eyes on their Twitter profile. Plans to build a city powered by a volcano that mines bitcoin. Mega-prisons ripped from the pages of Judge Dredd. That kind of thing. This week we’re talking about El Salvador and its millennial leader Nayib Bukele. With us here to do that is Tiziano Breda, an expert on the region who has covered it for the International Crisis Group and is now with IAI, the Italian international affairs institute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6atCMAVfE Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are authoritarians and there are tyrants, and sometimes they’re the same person. But would a true tyrant put himself up to face the people in an election that could be free and maybe even fair? With Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, we’re going to find out the exact flavor of authoritarian he is on Sunday, May 14, and in the days immediately following. Erdogan has been in power in his nation of more than 80 million people for nearly two decades, and in some ways, he’s brought it to near ruin, with economic policies based more on his gut than sound economic theory. He’s also not much on newspapers, freedom of information, or freedom of speech. On the other hand, no one is going to doubt the importance of his country on the world stage. Erdogan has become something like the Bosporus itself, a gateway or meeting point between NATO and Moscow, and even Iran occasionally. That sounds good, but it hasn’t made the West particularly happy. In one of the most recent examples, Turkey’s veto is the only thing standing between Sweden and NATO membership. Erdogan says it has to do with Sweden harboring Kurdish terrorists, but, like buying S-400 missile batteries from Russia, it could just be a thumb in the eye of all concerned. Maybe the U.S. should just sell Turkey those F-16s it wants. The main question, however, is what Erdogan will do when all the votes are counted. If he loses, does he go away? If he wins, does he take away more freedoms from Turks and become the tyrant he always had the potential of becoming? To answer these questions, Angry Planet spoke with Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign relations. He had some surprising thoughts—and a wager. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s a subscriber only episode of Angry Planet where we sit down with drone and UAP journalist Kelsey Atherton to deliver on an old promise: making up for a balloon-related episode from February some of you didn’t like. But first, we got into the news of the drone attack on the Kremlin, which occurred a few hours before we sat down to record. After that, Atherton takes us through his thoughts on the great high altitude object panic of 2023 and we dig into the meat of the episode: why it’s so hard to report on UAPs and why it’s often deeply professionally unpleasant to do so. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You may have noticed that we end our show with a snippet of the video game Fallout (my favorite). “War - war never changes.” What if that’s both true and not true? You have to love a dichotomy. Anyway, we are lucky today to have University of Chicago professor Paul Poast on the show. He looks at foreign policy—war—using statistics to make some sense of it all. This is a break down of why wars popular on the history channel (World War II, the Civil War) aren’t indicative of how wars are actually fought. The smaller proxy wars the U.S. and Russia have been fighting for the past 30 years are the status-quo, not some new kind of conflict. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How is that a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman posted government secrets to a private Discord group for almost a year before anyone noticed? On today’s episode of Angry Planet, Bellingcat’s Aric Toler walks us through the culture that created poster and edgelord Jack Teixeira. Toler also talks about working with The New York Times, dodging phone calls from the FBI, and the digital forensics he used to identify Teixeira. We talk about the Something Awful Forums, 4chan and KiwiFarms, and why Teixeira isn’t a “leaker” at all, he’s a poster. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Islamic State has largely fallen out of the western press with the weird exception of ISIS brides. And when we talk about the Islamic State, western press often ignores its broader crimes. The plight of the Yazidi, specifically, is largely ignored by press and NGOs. The plight of the so-called “ISIS bride,” however, is very much in fasion. But I wanted that photo and that testimony to lead off this post. Today’s episode is mostly about the women of the Islamic State, but the Yazidis are a crucial part of that story and we shouldn’t forget them. When Islamic State still had a caliphate that galvanized Western militaries, young men and women from around the world left their homes to join up. Their reasons were varied but their passion seems unwavering. Now the Islamic State is fractured and the Caliphate is in ruin but many of the fighters and so-called ISIS brides remain. Now, some of them want to go home, and Western media has looked at them with a shockingly sympathetic eye. Today’s show is a long interview with journalist Norma Costello, who has spent time in al-Hol where many of the women of the Islamic State now live. She’s written about them in UnHerd. After we’re done talking about the Islamic State, Norma and I switch gears and get onto a very Angry Planet topic: Irish tankies and their strained relationship with Russia and its war in Ukraine. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan stood before the American public and promised to put lasers in space. The Strategic Defense Initiative was meant to be the ultimate bulwark against communist intercontinental ballistic missile. It didn’t work. Deriseively called Star Wars, the system never worked. To this day, methods for shooting an ICBM out of the sky are shoddy at best and fantasy at worst. Joining us today is Joe Cirincione. In his own words on his substack at joecirincione.substack.com. He is a national security expert and author with 40 years of experience on these issues in Washington, D.C. and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held a number of prestigious roles in the nation’s capitol. To see the clip of science fiction authors Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven talking about meeting with Reagan and “winnninng the Cold War with Star Wars” go here: https://youtu.be/i-lSr2ud8Nc Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dictatorships of the last century had some famous youth groups. Hitler had his Youth, Lenin had his Young Pioneers, and Mussolini had his Opera Nazionale Balilla. Such groups once attracted huge followings but have largely fallen out of favor in the West. But, like so much else with the irredentist Vladimir Putin, he’s bringing it back. To help us understand this new youth movement and what it means for the future, we have the perfect guest. Ian Garner is a historian and analyst of Russian culture and war propaganda. He’s got a new book that’s coming out this spring Z Generation Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth. He’s also a professor. Queens University Kingston Ontario. Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.