It’s getting hot here in Monterrey, and if you’ve been reading my column lately, you know I’m not talking about the weather. Remember about the surge of military presence in the state I wrote about? Well I got to witness…
Posted on: March 6th, 2009 | Comments (49)
I saw that the US government posted an “extreme warning” travel advisory about Mexico last week and wanted to weigh in on the bullshit. If you’re traveling to Culiacan or Acapulco, or any major Mexican city for that matter, you…
Posted on: February 26th, 2009 | Comments (36)
This is a video of shootout that happened a few days ago (the same day the international bridge into America was blocked in Reynosa), that Yasha Levine sent along, asking me to decipher what the hell is going on. Well,…
Posted on: February 23rd, 2009 | Comments (19)
MONTERREY, MEXICO — I was in the middle of writing about a badass Colombian drug trafficker who’s taking over huge swaths of Mexico when convoy of green Army trucks fully packed with G3-carrying soldiers rolled through my hometown of Monterrey…
Posted on: February 18th, 2009 | Comments (17)
I was stuck in traffic with a broken tape deck, barely paying attention to the stupefyingly flat drone of NPR when I heard a story that made me want to carpet bomb the entire US. Just get it done with….
Posted on: February 17th, 2009 | Comments (32)
The past few weeks, national headlines swirled with distressing news for an American workforce already cowering in fear. As the world suffers the worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression, two-thirds of American CEOs plan to fire employees in the…
Posted on: February 11th, 2009 | Comments (41)
MONTERREY, MEXICO — Kidnapping and Mexico, they go together like beans and rice. There has always been a kidnapping industry in Mexico. It’s not for nothing that we have become the kidnapping capital of the world. Yep, that’s a true,…
Posted on: February 3rd, 2009 | Comments (30)
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.
Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100…
Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised…
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw…
Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda,…
Can I time these articles or what? The day after I put up my article on Ethiopia’s troubles in Somalia, 5 car bombs go off in two Somali cities targeting the Ethiopian consulate in Hargeisa, the Presidential Palace (such as…
A couple of years ago I mentioned that Ethiopian troops were occupying Mogadishu and said it was the perfect experimental setup for us. Now we could find out if anybody could pacify that place. Well, the answer’s in, because the…
Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes. Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the…
