I’ve been thinking about sleaze and corruption lately. It’s hard not to. Out here in windy, sun-baked Victorville, underhanded swindles are about as common a sight as the tumbleweeds blowing around the Mojave Desert. The biggest scam now is the…
Posted on: August 12th, 2009 | Comments (26)
The richness of Victorville’s fossil record never fails to surprise an amateur scam-historian like myself. See, all this time I thought I had been living in a brand new tract home development built on the virgin sands of the Mojave…
Posted on: August 11th, 2009 | Comments (10)
This article first appeared in Vice Magazine It is a sweltering afternoon in May on a patch of empty Arizona desert straddling the US-Mexico border. There is not a soul in sight, no one to mind the cloud of dust…
Posted on: August 8th, 2009 | Comments (32)
It’s 5 AM in Victorville, California, and I haven’t slept in 48 hours. Outside my second-story window, the sun is rising up over the jagged mountains across the desert. In the three months I’ve lived here, I’ve seen more sunrises…
Posted on: July 21st, 2009 | Comments (66)
Living in an abandoned neighborhood in an exurb way out on the edge of the California desert has its perks. There isn’t much in the way of nightlife in Victorville, California, and food options are limited, but it has one…
Posted on: June 23rd, 2009 | Comments (22)
There are three animals to welcome me home to California: the ants, the grasshoppers and the mockingbirds. To meet them, you walk past the traffic walls to the trash desert. There’s a shortcut to RiteAid across the army-colored dirt, trails…
Posted on: May 26th, 2009 | Comments (19)
I’ve always taken it for granted that brokers disseminate lies through the media to tweak property values. But a couple of weeks ago, I became a small cog in the national real estate propaganda machine myself while reporting for the…
Posted on: May 10th, 2009 | Comments (27)
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…
Velupillai Prabhakaran: LTTE’s Guerrilla Generalissimo One thing you have to give the doomed Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka credit for: their supporters sitting in comfortable first-world cities have no shame when it comes to begging for help. Militarily the Sri…
(Editor’s Note: Since this article was published yesterday for subscribers, Mr. Brecher has published a big follow-up which we post below after this article.) I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating…
Sorry about the long break. I had to deal with my real job, even picked up some extra hours. Once I would have bitched non-stop about that, but I’ve noticed that everybody’s gotten real flexible about their schedules, now that…
I come back from sick leave and there’s a whole pile of wars in my “in” box, like one of those old office cartoons. Still got to write up the dustup in Gaza, and then there’s the so-called final victory…
I’ll talk about Gaza tomorrow, but I’ve got the day off and it’s not my idea of a good time. For now I’ll just say it turned out exactly like I said it would, but blecch, it’s not my idea…
When you look at the fighting in Gaza, or any of the other small, chronic wars we get these days, you notice that traditional war buffs, the ones who like to talk about WW II, don’t have much to say….
I just found the perfect job for myself: media consultant for General Laurent Nkunda. Now there’s a job with perks. And General, you need me. I know you need me because I just saw an interview with you in the…
