A few years ago I wrote a column on how the Iran-Iraq War was the war nobody watched.

Well, thank God I was wrong. Maybe the US networks ignored that war but it turns out there were a lot of Iranian wannabe directors right there on the front line, getting it all on video. And thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you toobs can watch it all.

This is my absolute favorite clip so far. It’s shot from the very front of the Persian lines as Iraqi armor (T-55s, I think) advance toward them. (more…)

While the whole world has been focusing on Prime Minister Putin’s brutal slaughter of the Russian economy, a whole slew of other lesser, but oh so much more graphic, crimes have crept by undetected. We’re here to put a stop to that. The launch of EXILED ONLINE has put the gore sleuths of the infamous Death Porn Bureau back in business. Oh, gone are the good ol’ days. We’re not as well staffed as we once were and can’t have our coffee brought to us by one of our lovely DP girls. In fact, I’m the only one left. I won’t have time to cover all DP happenings that cross my desk, but it doesn’t mean I won’t try.

For this historic relaunch, we’re going with a DP classic that never gets old: the good ol’ vodka-fueled murder spree. And in these hot and humid summer months, there’s a lot of them to go around. As every seasoned DP hand knows, mixing 100-degree weather with 100-proof spirits makes for one hell of a bloody masha cocktail.

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Ever wonder who exactly those 47% of Russians are who are nostalgic for the days of Stalin? Here is one babushka caught singing the Soviet anthem, and singing, and singing, testing the notoriously patient Russian masses…until (more…)

One of the best things about war is that it’s a huge IQ booster. The only people who use their brains in peacetime are the suits: salesmen, real-estate agents. The rest of us just slog along for the paycheck, get home and get on the computer so we can have a virtual war. But once real war comes to town, every guy turns into MacGyver, thinking up ways to convert harmless civilian items like alarm clocks and remotes into killing devices.

The Shia militias in Iraq have just demonstrated this kind of killer ingenuity by finding a new way to say “thank you” to their American friends using nothing but a few unguided 107mm rockets, propane tanks, and a used truck. It’s like the kind of problem they give you in those online intelligence tests: how can you use a crummy unguided rocket, a lowly propane tank, and a junker of a truck to blast a heavily-defended US base in Baghdad?
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If you want to see a pure American evil puked up unrehearsed and uncensored, check out these Free Republic comments on the news that two people were killed and several more injured when a gunman started shooting in a Tennessee church. One wise Freeper says that “something tells [me]” the shooter “had a Quran in his back pocket.” Another just knows that the shooter’s identity is being protected because he’s a “minority.” The rest take the opportunity to make Unitarian jokes. (more…)

She’ll never get the grass stains out of those shorts

You remember those old kid-game cartoons telling you there are 22 things wrong with this picture and you have to circle them all? Like, say it’s a picture of undersea divers but instead of flippers, one of them’s wearing clown shoes or something. You have to remember, this was before Gameboy was invented. Very, very tough trying to amuse yourself as a kid in those days.

Anyway, most people don’t realize we continue to be confronted with “What’s Wrong With This Picture” challenges for the rest of our lives. We forget our early training, but the pictures go right on getting wronger and wronger.
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Here’s another great war graphic, courtesy of Yasha Levine at eXile. This one shows every coalition casualty as a red drop, so like Yasha wrote me, you see this blood rain falling on a map of Iraq as the days click by from the invasion in the spring of 2003 right through 2007. And it really is like rain: first the storm front comes through, up from the Gulf dripping through Basra and up the river valleys all the way to Mosul. But once the occupation settles in—you may remember that was when we were getting out our suntan lotion and expecting fine weather—the rain started falling hard. (more…)

Page will be a bare naked lady in jail for sure.

There was some wonderful news last week: Steven Page, lovable lead singer of the Barenaked Ladies, was arrested for cocaine possession. If Barenaked Ladies, BNL to their fans, were a normal band, this would hardly be news at all. In fact, it might be good for ticket sales. But BNL is a Canadian band, the paid pipers of Anglo-Canada’s blandest, dullest, most aggressively mulched minds–so a simple drug bust is a disaster for them and their trusting, stupid fans.
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Some time ago I was having lunch on the veranda at Moscow’s fancy Simachev Bar with my friend Alexei. He recently became the editor-in-chief of a high-end glossy magazine. We were having lunch and discussing my career options when I realized Alexei didn’t think I had any.

“I think you should just marry an oligarch,” he said. (more…)

Sergei Gorshkov, the political blogger who’s in it for the money, not the politics — and isn’t afraid to say so

It was a freakishly warm February morning in Moscow, eight days before Russia’s 2008 presidential election. Green army trucks packed with bleary-eyed soldiers crawled through the city streets, a sign of a paranoid government mobilizing itself against an election-eve revolution. (more…)

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View of Ulyanovsk from my 20th floor hotel room

On a Sunday evening in Ulyanovsk, after the Give Birth to a Patriot ceremony, I found myself in a movie theater watching Wanted, the new Russian-directed Angelina Jolie flick, with a 19-year-old prostitute named Katya. At least she said she was a prostitute. I met her while doing man-on-the-street interviews during the ceremony, and we ended up getting sloshed at an Aztec-themed nightclub a couple miles from Lenin’s birthplace. (more…)

What does the American surrender monkey call it when he is defeated in the Iraq War, and he is forced to retreat? A real country can accept defeat like a man, admit that it lost and it is retreating, as even someone as weak as Gorbachev did when he pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. (more…)

The hills are alive with the sound of RPGs

After six years of ignoring Afghanistan, things have gotten bad enough to force American officials to pay attention. For the past two months, U.S. casualties in Afghanistan have been higher than in Iraq. And on July 13, Afghanistan definitely got everybody’s attention when nine U.S. troops were killed in what Wikipedia is now officially calling “The Battle of Wanat.” Three days after the battle (more…)

I love this map of middle-east history converted into blots spilling out along a timeline. It’s like a bunch of different flavors of Hawaiian Punch getting spilled on a rug of the Middle East by drunk ten-year-olds who spiked the birthday party dixie cups with dad’s Old Crow. (more…)