PERTH, AUSTRALIA — A short update. Dr. Dolan’s old friend, Mark Steyn, the Canadian right-winger, has been touring Oz lately to promote his new book, After America, and Australia’s Tories are falling for him head over heels, declaring him the Great Right-Wing Humorist – almost makes you miss Hitchens, doesn’t it? (more…)
March 23rd, 2012 | Comments (51)
MT HAGEN, PAPUA NEW GUINEA — I’ve been spending this past month in the Papuan Highlands, in a paranoid little town called Mt. Hagen. My motel’s pretty typical for New Guinea: there’s a huge, corrugated-iron wall around the perimeter with…
January 6th, 2012 | Comments (34)
After two years of preparation, Australian Teabaggers are finally out in force and they look positively gruesome over here, though they’ll look familiar to American readers. Climate-denying factory farmers? Check. Friends of convicted child-killers? Got em. A Pinochet-style fascist who wants to “inflict maximum pain” on the Australian economy by causing artificial famines? Yes, Sir! – ¡VIVA EL GENERALISSIMO!
August 18th, 2011 | Comments (28)
So what does Myanmar’s population look like? Its last baby boom happened in the 80s, when the fertility rate was 4.0 to 4.7 – that’s four or five kids per mother. Today it’s just over two kids. This means people born before the mid-90s pose more danger to the regime than any generation after them.
Those people hit twenty during the last decade, and, sure enough, massive protests suddenly broke out in 2007 after 19 years of relative tranquility. Media sources never failed to mention that the protests were “monk-led,” but no one seems to have caught the significance of that.
July 13th, 2011 | Comments (22)
I’ve decided to write a sequel to my piece about DFW and American drug lit, and talk about how five Aussie writers have handled the same topic. But don’t worry, most of these people have been published in the US…
June 8th, 2011 | Comments (29)
PERTH — Western Australia is one of Oceania’s best sources of grotesquerie. In the same way the Southern States serve America, Western Australia provides an endless supply of serial killing tales, small-town hatred and supernatural horror. Melbourne might be the…
October 7th, 2010 | Comments (28)
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 US was the bulwark of The Alleged West. And even in Europe, everyone who mattered supported NATO, as far as we knew.
Looking back now, it’s our acceptance of the whole farce that seems odd. You’d think people would catch on after a few decades, but we never did.
This was first published as a Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter on May 21, 2021. But with the total collapse of the US-backed Kabul regime, it’s even more relevant now to ask: What was the strategy? Was there ever a plan there?…
Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to the Radio War Nerd podcast hosted by Gary Brecher & Mark Ames for podcasts, newsletters and more! It’s a full-time job, keeping track of the US/NATO campaign to start a fire somewhere on China’s borders. It’s…
Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd co-hosted with Mark Ames for podcasts, newsletters and more! There’s a gigantic, well-organized, extremely violent fascist group with tens of thousands of active members in Germany right now. And nobody notices. You’d think all the…
There’s a very naïve theory of language at work here, roughly: “if people speak nicely, they’ll act nicely” — with the fatuous corollary, “If people mention bad things, they must like bad things.”
The simplest refutation of that is two words: Victorian Britain.
Victorian Britain carried out several of the biggest genocides in human history. It was also a high point of virtuous literature…
Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd for podcasts, newsletters and more! The headline here is not a joke, unfortunately. It’s a question you can’t help asking if you’ve followed the war in Yemen. You probably…
We’re living through a massive artificial famine, right now. In NW Yemen, home of the Yemeni Shia who’ve fought off a Saudi-financed invasion, the “coalition” of invaders has settled on a slower, more effective strategy: artificial famine and blockade. This is how you kill off a troublesome population, not with bombs and guns alone. Hunger and disease are much better mass killers than firearms and bombs.
