Electric Politics Podcast
Electric Politics Podcast
Electric Politics publishes a weblog by George Kenney and several other authors, and the EP podcast of conversations George has with unusual, interesting, and accomplished people from a wide variety of backgrounds -- it's in-depth analysis and idiosyncratic opinion you won't find elsewhere. Think ...
Passenger Rail
Passenger trains. We're going to have to have more of them. But it would be folly to wait for the market to provide for our needs, because it won't. Passenger rail isn't profitable, anywhere. Let's be frank: it's socialized transportation. To talk about ...
Archy and Mehitabel
It's a truism — but no less true for that — we often can't get to reality except through literature. Or poetry. Or, in the case of Don Marquis, whatever it was, format-wise, that he wrote in his newspaper columns featuring Archy, the ...
Big Pharma, Unleashed
In America, giant pharmaceutical corporations run roughshod over the public. They price gouge, charging 50% more than in civilized countries. They foist useless, often harmful — even deadly — drugs on the market. They profoundly corrupt the ...
Baghdad Rumbled
Forget Afghanistan for a moment. A lot of us, including me, have been worrying that the U.S. may be stuck in Iraq indefinitely. Quil Lawrence, however, says that that may not be the case. Quil, NPR's Baghdad bureau chief, has spent many recent years in ...
Heartless Israel
It's crazy-making to watch the world's indifference to Israel's grinding destruction of the Palestinians. There isn't really even a word for it — either the indifference or the criminal assault, and particularly the latter. But like it or not, ...
Heartless Israel
It's crazy-making to watch the world's indifference to Israel's grinding destruction of the Palestinians. There isn't really even a word for it — either the indifference or the criminal assault, and particularly the latter. But like it or not, ...
Free Running
Sometimes speaking truth to power, even when you're in power, means risking your life. That's why Abolhassan Banisadr, the first President of Iran following the 1979 revolution, fled in 1981 to take up political asylum in France. Nor has he seen eye to ...
New Deal Reprise
It would be unfair, and incorrect (which is worse?), to say that everything about modern economic theory is based upon delusional thinking about human behavior and markets. Or that the theory has become merely a threadbare excuse to worship greed. ...
Building Seven
The 9/11 truth movement keeps getting stronger. And the movement's assault on the establishment's preferred narrative, after eight years, has reduced it to a risible absurdity. An abundance of irrefutable scientific evidence exists. The problem remains, ...
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Peace, a fundamental human right. ✓ Health care, a fundamental human right. ✓ An egalitarian society, a fundamental human right? Yes, let's add that last one, not because we're Communists, but because it makes sense ...
Forever From the Earth
Farmers are an endangered species. Farmers who fight back against what's happening to them by farming smarter, even more so. But without farmers who respect and love the land, who farm in a sustainable way, we're goners. Here are a few human scale ...
Ghosts in the Machine
Mysticism and science overlap more than people usually recognize as the former usually promises, in one way or another, adepts a means to enlightenment under their own steam. It's one reason — a pretty good reason — why the early Christian ...
Ringmaster
At this point, to be brutally realistic about it, there isn't much good to be said for Mr. Obama except, perhaps, that he's better than a Republican. One can only hope that he's susceptible to being pinned down by determined opponents from the ...
Whither Afghanistan?
What a tar baby. It's just not so simple to see how we get out of Afghanistan, either in the context of events over there or of politics here at home. One thing, though, is for sure: We won't win a military victory. To get a sense of how things are doing ...
ABRACADABRA
There's a surprising strain of magical thinking in American culture, indeed, in American politics, which bears examination. As it turns out, much of this is a relatively modern phenomenon dating from the middle of the nineteenth century — thus, in ...
Adjusted Narratives
Very little in our mainstream public discourse makes sense anymore. In a way, we're trying to have a collection of meta-discussions about things, but we're not quite smart enough to manage it. What we need to do is figure out how to call a spade a bloody ...
Unbelievable
Here's 'something a little different' for your late summer listening pleasure. Stacy Horn, an occasional NPR contributor, has written a marvelous book, Unbelievable, about the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory and its findings. Stacy thinks, and ...
Spasibo Moskva
Personally, I think we owe the Russians a lot. Moscow unilaterally dismantled the Soviet Union, thereby ending the Cold War (or the first Cold War, according to Stephen F. Cohen), and making the world a much better, safer place. Clearly, we should ...
Factory Girls
One out of every ten persons on the planet, roughly, is a Chinese woman. It's fair to say that their entry into the twenty first century defines a modern China, and that that China is preoccupied with its own problems and is not particularly interested ...