So what does Myanmar’s population look like? Its last baby boom happened in the 80s, when the fertility rate was 4.0 to 4.7 – that’s four or five kids per mother. Today it’s just over two kids. This means people born before the mid-90s pose more danger to the regime than any generation after them.

Those people hit twenty during the last decade, and, sure enough, massive protests suddenly broke out in 2007 after 19 years of relative tranquility. Media sources never failed to mention that the protests were “monk-led,” but no one seems to have caught the significance of that.

American movies are dead and I’m attending the funeral. It’ll be a long-running funeral, I expect, with services that go on for years and years and years, and I’ll be there for most of ’em. My beloved movies! After so…

  I just came across a massive dump of FBI files on the YIPPIES–the legendary 60′s youth movement led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. They declassified and released over 6,600 pages of FBI surveillance and intel on the Yippies—unfiltered, a…

American movies are dead, people. I know I’ve hinted before that American movies, collectively, were unwell, maybe even terminally ill, but that was in the still-hopeful past. Now it’s officially over. We can stop checking its pulse in the form…

I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere. The American Right devotes an insane…

  It’s just a coincidence that I happened to watch a new cable TV show, Jon Benjamin Has a Van, about the same time I got around to seeing the movie Super 8, so now the two of them are…

Since no one else in the pro-drug camp will say it, allow me: Ron Paul is a drug war asshole. He’s a con artist playing a shell game with our liberties with his slippery proposal that the answer to this savage…