It’s been a rough week for Russia’s Prime Minister, Victor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin. How rough? Well, as it turns out, he’s not worth 5 billion dollars, as alleged by United States’ Republican Congressman Henry Hyde. Nuh-uh. Hyde was just behaving like…
April 10th, 1997 | Leave Comment
On the walls of ugly sleeping quarters of Moscow, of all those Tchertanovos, Khimki-Khovrinos Belyaevos and Orekhovos, on the old fences here and there still possible to find the faded away posters. Young attractive woman, wearing some strange-looking, museum Egyptian-style…
April 10th, 1997 | Leave Comment
On March 27, when news first filtered into Moscow that 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, a gang of Trekkoid computer geeks in San Diego, had “shed their containers” in a suicidal bid to reach the “Higher Level,” eXpats…
April 10th, 1997 | Comments (1)
On Monday, we mainly sent out letters. Among those was a letter to the well-known public opinion firm VTsIOM-the first ripple in what we’d hoped would turn into a media groundswell indicting new deputy premier Boris Nemtsov in a “Blimps-for-Cities”…
April 1st, 1997 | Leave Comment
It seems that driving in Moscow is getting more and more dangerous all the time. On Sunday a high-speed ring-road collision of a new Mercedes 350 SL and a black tinted-windowed Chevrolet Suburban threatened to disintegrate into an even more…
April 1st, 1997 | 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.
One thing you notice more and more the longer you hang around this sleazy world is the way mainstream types can’t admit to the obvious. They always have to act shocked. So it’s like, “Bond Mogul Convicted of Fraud”-oh, the…
When the fourth of July rolls around, you’re supposed to think of, I don’t know, the Constitution and backyard cookouts like in old Chevy ads—but for me, it’s really Gettysburg we’re celebrating. Greatest battle in American history.
Summer Reading: Banquo’s Ghosts, by Richard Lowry and Keith Korman, Vanguard Press (2009), 352 pages. You have to feel a little sorry for the two neocons who co-wrote Banquo’s Ghosts. The idea seems simple enough: a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a…
It took me a while to figure out why everybody was nagging me to do a column on the Iranian elections. Everybody seemed to think it was all mysterious and world-shaking. Finally I realized, you’re all het up because every…
Kandy Man with long name who fought the Brits. Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place. You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just…
Cheech Marin moonlighting as the leader of the Tamil Tigers? I have to say “Thank you, God of War,” because we just saw a decisive victory in a war, for once. I never thought I’d live to see the day….
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…
