Most people had never heard of Sarah Palin when she was named Republican VP nominee. But I’d been hearing her name all too often, because I belong to a group called Defenders of Wildlife–and in her time as governor of Alaska, Palin has used her position as governor of Alaska to ruin the Alaskan wilderness in every way she could.

Her most recent “victory” came on August 26 when Alaska’s voters defeated Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from airplanes for sport.

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Here’s some more cool combat vids for you desk casualties. This time it’s Georgian troops shooting the Hell out of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on the day they rolled in to retake the province after Bush and Cheney promised them the Russians wouldn’t dare do a thing. So it didn’t work out all that great, but on that first day, when it was Georgian upgraded T-72s vs. Ossetian civvies with AK-47s, our little allies had themselves a real barnburner of a time, and luckily, one of them took these vids to show his little Facebook friends. (more…)

I saw a jet trail in the sky this morning and wondered why there aren’t so many of them any more. And instantly started grinding through the useless, absorbing little inquisitions that keep the mind from wasting its time on lesser matters like making a living. I’ve learned to be wary of the first, natural hypothesis of any 53-year old mammal’s brain, which is simply that the world is going to Hell, damn it. I’ve learned to squint around that little mental cataract and formulate slightly more rigorous options, little lists of possible responses like the heads-up display that leads the Terminator to choose “Fuck you, asshole.” Standing at the top of the alley, the dog sniffing the weeds beside me, I came up with three quick possibilities for the scarcity of jet trails:

1. Jet trails must be some sort of condensation of hot exhaust in cold air; so, because of global warming, the outer air isn’t as cold so condensation doesn’t form.

2. Better engines and jet fuel mixes mean less exhaust; hence, fewer jet trails.

3. There are as many jet trails as ever, idiot. You’re just getting old and whiney: “When I was a boy, there were jet trails so thick the woolly mammoths used to trip over them….” Shut up and keep walking. (more…)

This week on Tyolka Tuesday, we have something totally new. A Russian video sharing website called Smotri (which means “look” in Russian) just launched a new video chat function. It allows people to broadcast a live video feed from their desktop cameras while chatting with the public via a web instant messenger, sort of like a one-way Skype conversation that anyone can watch. Well, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Russia’s voyeuristic babes have taken a liking to this nifty service and have turned it into a virtual peep show for the masses overnight, literally. (more…)

Democratic Convention Clown

If you watched the Democratic Convention coverage, like I did, you know there’s no point complaining about it. That’d be like going to the circus and saying, “This is a horrible place, absolutely infested with clowns.”

And then going back to the circus the next three days in a row. No sympathy for you, you twisted clown-lover!

So, skipping lightly over how grotesque these proceedings always were and still are, let’s get to the final score: How’d it go? Did the Democrats win?
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They drove like people to whom the motorcar was new. They drove as they walked; and a stream of Tehran traffic, jumpy with individual stops and swerves, with no clear lanes, was like a jostling pavement crowd.

—V.S. Naipaul

Naipaul wrote these lines about Iranian drivers in revolution-gripped Tehran in the late 70s. But he might as well have been writing about Russian drivers today. The drive as they walk; on the sidewalk, through red lights, bumping into pedestrians. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. See, while America’s auto sales have gone into a nosedive, Russia just surpassed Germany to become the largest automobile market in Europe this year. Russians bought as many cars in the first six months of 2008 as they did in the entire last year, 1.65 million to be exact. The luxury category has posted the biggest growth, adding hundreds of thousands of uber-expesive automobiles to Russia’s decrepit roads. (more…)

We’ve been getting a lot of complaints lately. It seems many of our readers have been jonesing for their daily dyev fix ever since The eXile was taken offline by the Kremlin. Well, our policy at EXILED ONLINE is that the desperate customer is always right. While EXILED ONLINE does not have the resources to provide our deprived readers with 24/7 coverage, we can give you a weekly dyev fix. We can, and we will. And we’re calling it “Tyolka Tuesdays.” (more…)

I just flew back to the U.S., just in time to watch the Democratic Convention’s opening night. I’m amazed by how Soviet my country has become, or always was. We love these hokey big ceremonies just as much as any totalitarian country. I flipped the channel away from the Convention coverage and wound up on the opening day of the US Open, and there it was again—more ceremony, with all the hokey Soviet nostalgia that comes with it. Jesus, even the US Open has succumbed, (more…)

Hezbollah explains ‘Arab Spring’ to residents of West Beirut

Now that the Beijing games have wound up, we can get on to a sporting event with real significance: a Neocon Olympics to decide the most grossly wrong, stupid prediction by a Neocon pundit post-Iraq. Of course, it’s a very rich field. Being totally wrong about absolutely everything is the Neocons’ job, and they’ve been working overtime on it. Their proudest moment had to be in the lead-up to the Iraq war when Kenneth Adelman assured America that democratizing Iraq would be “a cakewalk.” Indeed, early Neocons like Adelman and Richard Perle (who predicted that Iraq would settle down “at the first whiff of gunpowder”) set the bar for disastrously wrong predictions so high that some have suggested that the trophy be retired in their honor. (more…)

Attempts to prove Barack Hussein Obama isn’t really an American citizen have gone about as well as the search for the footage featuring Michelle Obama excoriating “whitey.” Freethinking 100% Americanos like swift-boater Jerome R. Corsi and No Quarter’s Larry C. Johnson have no doubt been interviewing birth certificate-forgers and Muslim midwives and so on, looking for the ultimate proof of Obama’s un-Americanness. Silly of them, because we’ve had the proof staring at us from a million screens and glossy magazine covers for ages now. Here it is:

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Man discovered by apes

When I think of the 1990s, it’s the Ice Man I remember. He was found in 1991, in an Austrian glacier melting from global warming. At first the authorities took him for a murder victim (it was Silence of the Lambs time). They hacked his body out of the slush with a jackhammer, eager for their CSI moment, then started to realize he didn’t fit the profile of a Hannibal Lecter scorecard. His shoes were made of bearskin and deerskin and stuffed with dry grass; his cloak was woven of grass; he carried a flint knife that looks like a folded, dented can lid tied to a stick with twine. It began to dawn on the investigators that this guy was old, (more…)

Russia got into the social networking game a little late. The industry still isn’t very hi-tech and doesn’t have all those dorky Facebook plugins that people in the West are used to. But Russia’s got a natural resource that Facebook’s dumpy audience can never provide: people (as in chicks) that you actually want to get to know (as in biblically).

Take a look at our cultural exhibit. It shows how the girls on Russia’s premier social networking site, Odnoklassniki, compare to their American counterparts. (more…)

If you haven’t seen Tropic Thunder yet, go now. There are scenes in it so hilarious the whole audience goes into laugh-convulsions for minutes at a time, and you’re only going to participate in that “maybe-humanity-isn’t-so-bad-it-does-comedy” phenomenon about a dozen times in your life, so why are you still reading this review? Go! Go!

For those of you who’ve seen it already, is there some way, do you think, to get Robert Downey Jr. an Oscar for this thing? (more…)

Five days after Georgia invaded and seized the breakaway separatist region of South Ossetia, sparking a larger-scale Russian invasion to drive Georgian forces back and punish their leaders, Russia surprised its Western detractors by calling a halt to the country’s offensive. After all, the mainstream media, egged on by hawkish neocon pundits and their candidate John McCain, had everyone believing that Russia was hellbent on the full-scale annihilation and annexation of democratic Georgia.

But then came Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement–and we’re now forced to ask ourselves serious questions about the recent conflict: what really started it, how dangerous was it and what, with serious careful consideration, could be done to prevent it from turning into a worst-case scenario? (more…)