This article was published in The eXile on December 28, 2005.
The Putin regime’s latest moves to tighten controls over foreign NGOs are being portrayed in the West as yet more proof of Russia’s savage authoritarianism and anti-Western paranoia. While only a drunken apologist could deny Putin’s authoritarianism, the real question is whether or not the crackdown on NGOs is a symptom of mere tyrant-paranoia, or if Putin’s crackdown is based on some unpleasant realities that our media isn’t bothering to explore. (more…)
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.
I just picked up an old paperback copy of a Vietnam War book called SEALs: UDT/SEAL Operations in Vietnam by Tim Bosiljevac. The book chronicles the early history of the Sea, Air and Land Teams, from their founding under President…
So now it’s official: I was right and the rest of the media was wrong about the war in Georgia last year. The EU just issued a report blaming Georgia for starting last year’s war with Russians. About 1 year…
(This article first appeared in TheNation.com on May 11, 2009.) The May 7 edition of the Washington Post features one of the most poorly timed op-ed commentaries in recent memory. Carrying the harmless headline “A Friend to Georgia and Russia,” it…
