Honorable Mention: Blessed are the wind-blown embers. Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Let us start with a fitting quote from yesterday’s LA Times article: A wind-blown ember can be opportunistic, slipping through tiny breaches in the homes. Opportunistic indeed! These…
November 19th, 2008 | Comments (4)
Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100…
November 18th, 2008 | Comments (44)
Daniel Craig working on his stance. The ultimate proof that movies these days are rotten: Quantum of Solace is breaking records at the box office. It’s not the public’s fault; people want to see something move onscreen and they’ll take…
November 17th, 2008 | Comments (7)
Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised…
November 17th, 2008 | Comments (15)
The Accused: Raymond “Chuck” Foster, Imperial Wizard of the KKK Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Normally a sad nitwit like Raymond “Chuck” Foster wouldn’t even be worthy of the attention of the eXiled Inquisition Team, but now that he’s managed…
November 14th, 2008 | Leave Comment
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw…
November 13th, 2008 | Comments (21)
Mormon Baptismal Font: plenty of room for everybody. Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: We have to admire the sheer chutzpah of the Mormons. Whereas we struggle with faulty humankind, inquisiting people, torturing them, trying to shove them toward the true…
November 12th, 2008 | Comments (5)
Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda,…
November 11th, 2008 | Comments (32)
We all know in the backs of our minds that Barack Obama’s incredible victory will eventually be followed by disappointment. But does it have to come so soon, and hit so hard? The answer will be yes, if Lawrence Summers…
November 11th, 2008 | Comments (7)
Last weekend, a Russian anarchist revolutionary art group called War pulled a fast one on Prime Minister Putin. Or at least they thought they did. Russian revolutionaries sure do fall far from the tree these days. On the night of…
November 10th, 2008 | Comments (1)
The first polls had just closed when the Republican Right’s “Agony of Defeat” moment arrived. It was just after 8 p.m. — right as Fox’s “America’s Election HQ” show returned from a commercial break, and Brit Hume welcomed viewers back…
November 8th, 2008 | Comments (6)
Mass psychosis? So by now you’ve probably heard something about this election that happened on Tuesday. There seemed to be a whole hoo-ha about it, people hugging and high-fiving in the streets, international rejoicing, everybody laughing and crying and gibbering….
November 7th, 2008 | Leave Comment
Mark Ames is the founding editor of The eXile and co-editor of The eXiled. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Playboy, Daily Beast, Alternet, Radar, The New York Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of“Going Postal: Rage, Murder…
November 5th, 2008 | Leave Comment
Today’s Defendant: Mike Williams, resident of Douglas, Arizona Statement from the Grand Inquisitor: Hard-working people all across Mexico are busting their asses for American consumers. No, we are not talking about the migrant workers cleaning your dishes, picking your grapes…
November 4th, 2008 | Comments (2)
Today’s Defendant: Twitter Twats Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: When you join Twitter you become able to communicate in short bursts of information with many people from your mobile phone or computer. Your phone becomes a vibrating message-whore, hemorrhaging useless…
November 4th, 2008 | Leave Comment
Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: With one day left before the election, CNN chose as its microcosm of America-at-da-crossroads one Kevin Sheen, a whey-faced Irish-American idiot from the Midwest, who coyly offers his quandriness as an “undecided” voter.
November 3rd, 2008 | Leave Comment
Here’s a friendly warning for you: don’t count on the movies to get you through the holidays, any more than they got you through the Wall Street seizures or this gut-wrencher of an election. As bad as the movies have…
November 3rd, 2008 | Comments (1)
Seems like I ought to do something religious today, so I picked a battle from the the ultimate military expression of religious devotion: The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Europe’s way of debating the Catholic vs. Protestant thing by counting corpses.
Somebody with a face finally died in Libya. His name was Tim Hetherington, an Oxford literature graduate who made that documentary Restrepo about an Afghan base.
Stories about the riots in Northern Nigeria are starting to come in, full of amazing details and ridiculous lies. The lies are the first thing you notice.
One of the strange things about this war in Libya is how slowly it’s moving.
Today we’ve got election riots in Northern Nigeria, a military mutiny in Burkina Faso, and massacres in Ivory Coast. They look like separate stories, but they’re not. It’s all one story, a long, slow war between the coastal christianized people…
Today I wanted to talk about the great nominations y’all provided last week when I asked for people’s favorite war books.
Battle of Rich Mountain: McClellan Wimpout Preview Lately I’ve been reading soldiers’ memoirs, mostly from the Western Theater of the Civil War. A lot of them are by Ohio men, and you realize quickly that Grant wasn’t so unique. He…
