“Mao: the Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Random House 2005 See it on Amazon.com… When I watched the second Addams Family movie, I knew there’d be a “blockbuster biography” of Mao coming soon. The key scene comes…

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.

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.

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…

Let’s see how well you know your military history. Give the date and place of this comminique: “Our Victorious Forces Liberate Zalambessa!! Our victorious and heroic air and ground forces have liberated the town of Zalambessa after completely annihilating the…

They asked me to think about how war would change over the next 150 years for the eXile’s anniversary issue. Weird to think about it: wars going on when you’re dead. My doctor told me it’s maybe 15 more years…

Last column I asked readers to suggest wars that’d be more fun for the US to get involved in than Colombia. I got some great answers — and thanks everybody who wrote in — but when I looked into the…