Our friend,the Roundworm

Today we’ll introduce you to the Intestinal Roundworm, a hideous parasite which infects one out of every four people in the world. That’s not a misprint: one out of four. More than one and a half BILLION people. Yup, every fourth person on this planet is nothing but a travelling worm farm. The odds are pretty good that you, sir, madam, are ferrying a few hundred of these parasites in your gut as you read this. (more…)

Everybody knows a few of the more overhyped parasites who infest this great rotting corpse we call Earth, but most people don’t realize how many of them there are, and how resourceful they are in finding ways to get at us, their hosts. The most humiliating thing about many of them is that, though they will infect and kill us, they don’t really like us. We’re just sort of a rental car they want to drive to their preferred host. (more…)

“Aging is a process which we know will go from bad to worse, until it comes to the worst of all.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer

In Schopenhauer’s world, you’re not allowed to die quickly, the way people die in movies. You’re much more likely to go out slowly, in agony and terror. It can happen in hundreds of thousands of ways, because one of Nature’s little jokes is that everything you have can and will be used against you. Your skin — any cell of it could decide to become a melanoma franchise at your expense. Your bones, your muscles, every organ in that squishy torso can fail for hundreds of different reasons, or for no comprehensible reason at all. (more…)

Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin

By Michael McFaul, Cornell University Press, 2001

This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.

The failures to meet academic standards are the most glaring fault of the book. What can one say of an academic work that attempts to chart Russia’s “course to democracy” without once even attempting to define its central term, “democracy”? Was this mere incompetence? God knows there is incompetence and provincial gaucherie enough in McFaul’s work, from the Preface, in which he informs us that “In 1799, France was still deep in the throws [sic] of revolutionary turmoil…,” to his Conclusion, which ends with some of the most inadvertently comic attempts at grand chiasmus since Cicero wore out his whipping-arm on his duller pupils. (more…)

This article was originally published in The eXile on November 13, 2002.

No, we’ve been censored, by, of all people, David Johnson, a squeamish Quaker who runs the once-highly-influential Johnson’s Russia List… acting on the orders of his sponsor, a Democrat Party wonk and Stanford professor whose dedication to promoting democracy in the former Soviet Union is matched only by his relentless four-year campaign to censor and marginalize the eXile.

Johnson hadn’t posted an eXile article in months. I didn’t pay attention because his list isn’t important to us the way it used to be. The JRL has fallen into relative obscurity (it seems he begins at least one mailing a month with a pleading note like “Is this too much?” or “Any comments?” or “Would appreciate some feedback from JRL recipients”) and our newspaper is less focused on Russia than a few years ago. But recently I noticed that even our Russia pieces weren’t making it onto the list. That seemed wrong. I wanted to find out. (more…)

It was a week for do-it-yourselfers in the war world. A little lesson for us all, that you don’t need a lot of hardware to make war. All you need is the old standbys: hunting rifles, blasting caps, and trucks full of fertilizer. There was some guy in a white van driving around DC shooting all the wrong people; there was that bomb in Bali that wiped out half the surfers in Australia; and there was the sad case of a Finnish looneytune who decided to blow up a mall in Helsinki.

The nicest part about the Helsinki episode was the fact that the bombmaker saved the taxpayer some money — blew himself up while planting the bomb. No messy trial to worry about. Messy floor, yes. Messy trial, no. The Brits used to have a name for that kind of fumble, when some IRA bomb-delivery boy would trip over the cat on his way to drop off the payload and blow himself up. The Brits used to call it an “own goal,” which is what those soccer fags call it when you boot the ball into your own net. Like Bill Hudson says in Aliens, “Game over, man!” (more…)

The Europeans have turned against America in the War On Terror. They believe that Americans don’t understand a thing about the world. That Americans are ignorant, shallow and drunk with military might. In such a people’s hands, all that weaponry and the willingness to use it poses a greater danger to the world, or more specifically to Europe, than even Osama bin Laden.

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America’s handling of Iraq is a perfect example. “We Europeans have a profound understanding of the local people,” they say. “You Americans don’t even know where Iraq is located on a map.”Thus think the Europeans.

Should America, and the rest of the world, listen? What is Europe’s lesson to humanity? What example have they set for the rest of us? (more…)