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All things move towards their end, even seemingly omnipotent political leaders, and authoritarian systems are shaped by the question of succession long before the leader dies. Xi Jinping is 72 years old and the Chinese Communist Party has started to consider what comes next. Those conversations are shaping the political reality of the country.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Brown University professor Tyler Jost comes on the show to explain China is navigating what life may look like after Xi.

• How succession shapes politics in an authoritarian system
• How does China’s government actually work?
• The path to the Chinese presidency
• As always, it’s all about who you know
• Princelings
• Xi’s path to power
• Corruption as influence
• When the eye of the leader lands upon you
• “Cyberpunk hellscape”
• Some parting notes on American Maoism

After Xi—The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

Bureaucracies at War

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If the internet is a battlefield, does that mean the United States needs a new military force to dominate it?

On this episode of Angry Planet, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Edward Charles Cardon and former House Armed Services Committee staffer Joshua Stiefel make the case for spinning off the Cyber Force into an independent branch. Both are part of a new commission at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — partnered with Jason’s new bosses at Foundation for Defense of Democracies — with the goal of preparing for a new branch that both feel is inevitable.

It’s a wild and wandering conversation that touches on Neuromancer, AI, and fighting a cyber war against the Islamic State.

• “A Cyber Force is inevitable”
• How cyber works now
• From Army Air Service to Air Force to Space Force
• Volt Typhoon as warning
• It’s hard to recruit hackers
• The Goldwater-Nichols Act mentioned, drink
• Basic training for hackers?
• A retired Lt. General at Defcon
• The weird nebulous thinking of AI and cyber
• The Army has soldiers, the Space Force has Guardians, what about Cyber Force?
• Neuromancers? Hackers?
• “The leaders of this domain have to understand the people they’re talking to.”
• Change is only possible in the aftermath of something cataclysmic
• “AI is gonna put the offense on steroids”
• Glowing Symphony
• Islamic State as the model conflict

CSIS Launches Commission on Cyber Force Generation in Partnership With Cyber Solarium

United States Cyber Force: A Defense Imperative

Volt Typhoon

Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986

The Rise of ‘Vibe Hacking’ Is the Next AI Nightmare

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

Operation Glowing Symphony

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Journalists and Nazis have changed a lot in the years since the end of World War II; journalists are on the outs while Nazis are having a bit of a moment. Across the U.S. and Canada, avowed fascists have committed murder, attempted to destroy the power grid, and actively recruit online and in person. As these extremists work to hide their identity, journalists and law enforcement use advanced tech to expose them. But at what cost?

On this episode of Angry Planet, Jordan Pearson of the CBC’s visual investigations unit talks us through how he and his co-workers use open source intelligence to expose fascists. We also discuss the ethical struggles that come with using the tools of the surveillance state to track them down.

• Nazis hiding their faces
• Exercise as a path to fascism
• What’s the public concern?
• Hate speech in Canada vs America
• How a journalist decides when to unmask a fascist
• When a journalist uses facial recognition and leaked data in the public interest
• Falling into OSINT
• Using a boxing glove to find a specific gym
• The lightswitch!
• A gazebo with a chipped tooth
• Can AI help journalists? (yes)
• The nightmare of transcription
• “It’s trending towards Nazis”

How a Northern Irish town descended into 3 days of anti-immigrant violence

Man accused of facilitating terrorism used quarry outside Quebec City for target practice

Tracking Canada’s fascist fight clubs

What’s an active club?

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The world is living with a Cold War hangover. The logic of deterrence, which dominates the minds of the people who plan nuclear wars, means that America must have enough nuclear weapons to credibly threaten to destroy the world should someone launch nukes at it. That thinking led to a world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and that was just when the U.S. had the Soviet Union to think about. Now it’s facing the twin threats of Russia and China. Does that mean America needs twice the nukes to handle twice the threats?

Some in the Pentagon seem to think so, and the world is embarking on a radical and expensive nuclear build up the likes of which it hasn’t seen in a generation.

What if there’s another way? James Acton is here to pitch us on a world where Optimal Deterrence does not mean spending trillions of dollars on new world-ending weapons just to make sure everyone else doesn’t use theirs.

Acton is a co-director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program and the author of a new article that outlines the 21st century nuclear arms race and a new plan to stop it.

• Podcasting from an iPhone in a closet
• The apocryphal camera lens story
• The nuclear tease
• What are nuclear weapons pointed at?
• How to win a three-way nuclear war
• The dread logic of counterforce targeting
• Trump’s nuclear reticence
• How many nukes are there anyway?
• How to spend a trillion dollars on nuclear weapons upgrades
• Acton’s big idea
• “I don’t think we lose much by ceasing to target an adversary’s nuclear forces.”
• “It doesn’t matter if they believe it or not.”

Optimal Deterrence

Russia’s nuclear torpedo

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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Sometimes it’s good to back up and ask the basic questions: How do we know Iran was even developing nuclear weapons?

On this episode of the show, the Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis walks us through the history of the Iranian nuclear (weapons and energy) program. It’s got it all: diplomacy, assassinations, cowardly politicians, and uranium fever.

Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute, member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and former member of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. He knows the tale well and he’s here to tell it straight.

• Damning the strikes with faint praise.
• “The hard part of a nuclear weapon is not the explodey part.”
• Making a nuclear weapon is a solved problem.
• The Iran-Iraq war and the origins of Iran’s nuclear weapons program
• The ladders of Natanz, how they cascade down
• Energy programs are always bigger than weapons programs.
• Unmasking the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Israel’s war on the program
• How to enrich uranium
• The “torturous” process behind the Iran deal
• Congressional cowards
• “A new generation of suckers”
• The French movie goodbye

The Deal

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Pauline Shanks Kaurin PhD. was, until recently, the Stockdale Chair for Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College. She’d been there since 2018, teaching philosophy and ethics to U.S. military officers and the occasional civilian. Then came Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and marching orders she said stifled academic freedom.

So she resigned.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Pauline talks us through her decision and tells us what she saw from the inside of one of the U.S. military’s most lauded academic institutions as the new administration seeks to restrict what’s taught in the classroom.

• Disclosures and caveats
• “A moral dilemma I couldn’t resolve”
• On Obedience
• Admiral James Stockdale
• “We’re all in vacation mode.”
• “The snitch line”
• Purging books, telling professors what not to talk about
• “I don’t want to be on Fox News”
• It happened fast
• Suggestions of pulling manuscripts at the editor
• What happens to a military that isn’t taught honor and ethics?
• Compliance versus deference
• Avoiding discomfort as a policy position
• Disagreements as combat
• A heavy metal argument
• The cost of taking a moral stand
• “Everyday is ethics day”

A Military-Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest

Disgraceful Pardons: Dishonoring Our Honorable

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You can’t win a war with airpower alone, despite what the U.S. Air Force will tell you. For more than 100 years, the masters of the air have promised that military and political objectives can be achieved if you just let them drop enough bombs.

It’s a theory that’s been tested, and fallen short, many times. Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration’s use of 14 GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iranian nuclear sites, is just the latest test. The promise is that this has set back Iran’s nuclear program (it probably has) but Israel is hoping for much more—regime change in the Islamic Republic.

Time will tell, but I’m not betting on it.

On this episode of Angry Planet we zoom out and talk about the strategy behind airpower in the 21st century. Robert Farley, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kentucky, is on the show today to give us his thoughts on the Iran strikes, airpower in general, and the lessons to be learned from watching the war in Ukraine.

• Should we abolish the independent Air Force?
• Was Israel’s war on Iran a success?
• Has airpower ever forced regime change?
• Curtis LeMay mentioned
• Bombing doesn’t create revolutionary fervor
• Airpower as theater
• “Israel-splaining”
• What’s a Golden Dome for anyway?
• Are FPV drones part of the air force arsenal or infantry weapons?

Strikes on Iran Show the Force, and Limits, of Airpower

Robert on PBS in Kentucky

Buy Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

The Five-Ring Circus: How Airpower Enthusiasts Forgot About Interdiction

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The ocean is vast, beautiful, and lawless. Thousands of miles from any coast, power belongs to those who seize it.

On this episode of Angry Planet, journalist Ian Urbina stops by to discuss the Outlaw Ocean Project and the second season of its incredible podcast. Urbina and his team of investigative journalists are telling stories about human rights, labor, and the environment on the vast swaths of the planet covered in water.

• The hidden cost of the seafood supply chain
• Why the ocean is such a lawless place
• “Crimes at the intersection of environment and human rights.”
• Libya is “hell on earth” for migrants
• Aliou’s journey to Libya
• How Europe enables Libyan militias to police its borders
• The migration to slavery pipeline
• A team of journalists at gunpoint
• Life on a Chinese squid fishing vessel
• Low tech and high tech reporting gets the job done
• “That is what life is like in that niche of hell.”

Listen to the Outlaw Ocean Podcast

Inside a migrant detention center in Libya

China: The Superpower of Seafood

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The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible?

On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley’s dreams of the future. It’s not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don’t work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It’s all the subject of Becker’s new book: More Everything Forever.

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• Franics Fukuyama and the end of everything
• “Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”
• Moore’s law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil’s father
• The Face on Mars and large language models
• Elizas all the way down
• The false binaries of the tech bro future
• Silicon Valley’s lost boys
• “Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”
• Stasis for me but not for thee
• “Mars sucks”

Against Life Extension by Francis Fukuyama

More Everything Forever on Bookshop

More Everything Forever on Amazon

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America loves the Western. Stories about frontier towns, outlaws and lawmen, and—most of all—killing. How did the myth and legend of the gunfighter come to permeate the U.S.? Were there rules to gunfights? How did you become famous by killing people? Did Texas, yes Texas, make all this possible?

We’ll answer those questions in this episode of the show as we discuss the new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. It’s the work of returning guest (and Texan) Bryan Burrough.

• Texas is both the West and the South
• What made Texas so violent
• What, exactly, is a gunfighter?
• The rules of the duel
• “Boys, I’m killed”
• How to win friends while killin’ people
• “What is more equalizing than a man alone with a gun?”
• Olive, Isom Prentice
• Historiography of the gunfighter
• Modern bank robbers are boring
• The cattle business is the perfect vehicle for violence
• The future belongs ... to pirates?

Buy The Gunfighters from an independent bookstore or from Amazon

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