Last Thursday I got up at 7:00 a.m. and drove NASCAR-style to make it in time to my arraignment hearing at the Central Arraignment Court in sunny downtown Los Angeles 8:30 a.m.–only to find out that I’d wasted my time….
Posted on: January 10th, 2012 | Comments (24)
A video recorded during last week’s early-morning raid on Occupy Berkeley shows a burly Berkeley cop strutting around with a repeat-fire tear gas grenade launcher, menacingly pointing it at protesters without provocation. At one point the bloodlusting cop threatens to shoot pointblank the guy with the camera…
Posted on: December 26th, 2011 | Comments (21)
Free Press’ Josh Stearns has put together, and continues to maintain, a great up-to-date resource that’s keeping track of all the journalists arrested while covering the Occupy movement. As of today that number stands at 36, and includes the recent…
Posted on: December 21st, 2011 | Comments (5)
With violence and government crackdowns making headlines from so many familiar parts of the world, there’s hardly been a peep in the media about the biggest and ugliest massacre of all: Last Friday in Kazakhstan, riot police slaughtered up 70…
Posted on: December 19th, 2011 | Comments (32)
Late last week, as I was reading a story by the Family Guy writer who had been brutally arrested and mistreated at the Occupy LA crackdown, I suddenly realized, “Holy shit, I remember that guy!” I didn’t catch his name…
Posted on: December 13th, 2011 | Comments (41)
I have written about the the correlation between austerity programs and violence–whether the mass state violence like the 1989 “Caracazo” bloodbath in Venezuela in response to an IMF-sanctioned austerity program, in which up to 3,000 people were massacred (leading eventually…
Posted on: December 7th, 2011 | Comments (31)
When I worked in Russia, there were two sets of laws–one for Kremlin favorites and oligarchs, who never worried about paying for their crimes; and laws for everyone else, who paid no matter what. Here, it’s starting to get even…
Posted on: December 6th, 2011 | Comments (38)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
All the gizmo freaks are drooling because the US Navy has supposedly demonstrated a fearsome new “ray gun,” the HEL, High Energy Laser, designed to burn planes, missiles or boats that get too close to surface ships. The trusting Dilberts…
First I have to get today’s big anniversary out of the way.
The IMF: “Liberte, Egalite…Just Give Us the Frickin’ Money!” It was a lively weekend. Down in Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo was ruining the script by holing up in his urban bunker in Abidjan, even though the IMF and their French…
I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to do the Sunday blog on war books. The only problem is, there are so many great ones it’s hard to decide which one to start with.
Gen. Earl Van Dorn: Dixie girls thought he was handsome, more proof Dixie was insane. If you ever need to remind yourself that military command isn’t as glamorous as people think, it doesn’t hurt to go over the short,…
NOTE: My links are messed up here, I realize. Found out what’s wrong. I’ll have it fixed in tomorrow’s column. Meantime, here’s the link to the video I’m talking about: I’ve been watching the famous motorcycle-shooting video from Afghanistan,…
Which’ud Ya Rather Have, A BMW… A couple of the comments on yesterday’s blog were about comparing the RPG-7 and the M2 Carl Gustav Recoilless Rifle. It’s the kind of question I used to love when I talked hardware, but…
