It was 11:00 am on Saturday morning when I woke up and jumped out of bed in panic. I realized that the night before, I had parked my car in a 2-hour parking zone around the corner from my house….
Posted on: January 30th, 2009 | Comments (30)
If you’ve ever been in Russia, you’ve no doubt seen the token dead-drunk man, barely stumbling home from work in the middle of winter. You probably thought to yourself: What happens if that guy falls and passes out? Well, here’s…
Posted on: January 28th, 2009 | Comments (6)
Pancho Montana is an eXiled Special Mexican War on Drugs Correspondent. As a native of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, located in northern Mexico, Mr. Montana lives in Gulf Cartel territory. That means the streets belong to the Zetas, a paramilitary organization…
Posted on: January 26th, 2009 | Comments (24)
Drugs may be the major American story of our era, the thing that did more to alter behavior and law, that redistributed income to the poor far more dramatically than any tinkering with tax codes, that jailed more people and…
Posted on: January 5th, 2009 | Comments (30)
Little did I know that when I lost everything last year, I was doing research. At the time I thought it was just stupidity or bad luck or both. But now that the economy’s crashing, it turns out I’ve been…
Posted on: October 15th, 2008 | Comments (35)
A few weeks ago, I went to see a new Russian horror film called S.S.D. (the acronym translates to “Death to Soviet Children”) about a bunch of annoying Moscow urbanites who get slaughtered while shooting a reality TV show in…
Posted on: October 8th, 2008 | Comments (1)
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.
The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…
I love this map of middle-east history converted into blots spilling out along a timeline. It’s like a bunch of different flavors of Hawaiian Punch getting spilled on a rug of the Middle East by drunk ten-year-olds who spiked the…
Just in case you missed this kickass interview with Gary Brecher on Wisconsin Public Radio
War & Drugs: flying while you’re dying Hey, I’m back! For a few weeks there, the War Nerd was unhorsed, pulled over to the side watching life’s rich convoy zoom by. Thanks to the damn ungrateful Russian government, the old…
FRESNO, CA – It’s summer, you’ve got a little more time off, so you can read up on war instead of trying to live in whatever boring suburb you live in. Lawns, neighbors, dogs, kids—it all sucks and the best…
Iraq Police Academy 6: Doin’ The Mosul Shuffle! FRESNO, CA — OK, we’ve just gone through a really exciting time in world military moves, so let’s test your strategic IQ. What’s the relation between these three recent developments: 1. On…
Photographic evidence of Tibet’s military, circa 1950 FRESNO, CA — Writing a column on the military history of Tibet seemed like a good idea in the good old days, a week ago, before I started actually trying to research it….
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…
