Adam Curtis, the British filmmaker whose many great films and blog posts for the BBC we’ve been ramming down our readers’ throats (in the parlance of our times) lo these past few years, has a new piece about Russian politics, punk and avant-garde that is a must-read. It’s the only work I’ve ever read that makes sense of Edward Limonov—the former eXile columnist and leader of the radical opposition—and places Limonov and his Kremlin nemesis, Vladislav Surkov, in the context of Russia’s post-Communist politics, and Russia’s wild punk rock avant-garde. (more…)

Browsing through some old copies of the late, great Spy magazine, I found this interview with the former spokesman for the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), Joe Powers, in which he declares himself a Libertarian.

Here’s the article spread, published in the October 1995 issue of Spy:

And here’s a close-up of the historic moment when NAMBLA’s spokesman declared himself as a lover of liberty, so to speak:

Obviously, this can mean only one thing: Spy magazine was a mouthpiece for Obamabots.

So it’s back to the depressing topic of Atlantic Monthly blogger and paid PR flak for defense contractors, Joshua Foust–something I’d rather avoid, but the scumbags won’t let me. Foust and his minions have managed the impossible–they’ve outdone themselves in vileness; who imagined such a feat was possible? Ever since I exposed Foust as a massacre-denier defending the interests of Kazakhstan’s dictator for life, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and covering for Chevron, the biggest US oil company doing business in Kazakhstan, Foust’s personal web site, Registan.net, has waged a rank smear campaign against an heroic Russian journalist, Elena Kostyuchenko. (more…)

Last week, some troll named Joshua Foust attacked my article about the massacre in Kazakhstan on December 16. I really had no idea who Foust was until I started getting emails from readers telling me “some guy with a goatee is having a meltdown on Twitter.” What upset Foust so much about my article was that I dared to report a death toll number, “up to 70,” that differed from the official figure of 15 that the regime in Kazakhstan wanted the outside world to believe. Why did Foust take on the role of massacre-denier for Kazakhstan’s notoriously brutal, corrupt regime? (more…)

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 striking oil workers, wounding somewhere between 500 and 800, and arresting scores. Almost as soon as the massacre went down in the western regional city of Zhanaozen, the Kazakh authorities cut off access to twitter and cell phone coverage–effectively cutting the region off from the rest of the world, relegating the massacre into the small news wire print. (more…)

Exiled editor Mark Ames went on The Alyona Show to talk about why the financial sector keeps expanding even after the collapse of 2008, American decadence, the Occupy protests, and why “It’s going to get ugly” in this country…

Watch the video: (more…)

There are a lot of reasons why Russians–young Russians, young Muscovites in particular–poured out into the streets last Saturday to protest rampant election fraud in the Duma vote. For the past couple of decades, young Muscovites couldn’t be bothered with politics of any sort–they’ve been dealing with fraud-riddled elections going back to 1996, or 1993–take your pick of post-Soviet elections.  (more…)