He may be dead now, I don’t know. He should have been dead long ago, but these early boomers, born in California, have many lives. From some angles, Alex’s life was clear proof of what spoiled, invincible brats they were,…
Posted on: June 9th, 2009 | Comments (51)
US Stocks Gain On Report Of Pending Home Sales . . . Pending Home Sales Rise the Most in Over Seven Years . . . Consumer Confidence Spurs Broad Gain . . . You see the same bullshit headlines churned…
Posted on: June 5th, 2009 | Comments (39)
Last week, Obama moved another step closer to creating the ultimate retro-70s Middelbrow-ocracy when he appointed a loathsome overachieving hamburger-head named Cass Sunstein to a little-known but highly-powerful government post: director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—otherwise known…
Posted on: May 22nd, 2009 | Comments (46)
(This article first appeared in TheNation.com on May 11, 2009.) The May 7 edition of the Washington Post features one of the most poorly timed op-ed commentaries in recent memory. Carrying the harmless headline “A Friend to Georgia and Russia,” it…
Posted on: May 12th, 2009 | Comments (17)
Listen to Ames talking about the cocaine-fueled comedy that is CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow. This segment was aired on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio on April 21, 2008, on the show “Four O’Clock Tuesdays With Gustavo Arellano.” Why does CNBC host Lawrence…
Posted on: April 22nd, 2009 | Comments (18)
(This post was published on Playboy.com) There’s word out this week that the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has thrown his support behind a bill that would declare sovereignty for the state of Texas. The bill is called HCR 50, and it’s…
Posted on: April 17th, 2009 | Comments (35)
Most Recent Photograph of That Guy That Plath Popped Out (bottom right; circa 1962) Sylvia Plath’s son died yesterday. That’s how it was reported, even by the BBC. The dead man’s name was Nicholas Hughes, not Plath, but in death…
Posted on: March 24th, 2009 | Comments (32)
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.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Can I time these articles or what? The day after I put up my article on Ethiopia’s troubles in Somalia, 5 car bombs go off in two Somali cities targeting the Ethiopian consulate in Hargeisa, the Presidential Palace (such as…
A couple of years ago I mentioned that Ethiopian troops were occupying Mogadishu and said it was the perfect experimental setup for us. Now we could find out if anybody could pacify that place. Well, the answer’s in, because the…
Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes. Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the…
