Thug Lessons posted:

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

According to his facebook page he's educated as an electrical engineer. I think he's just a Chinese history nerd who naturalized as an American, so he can relate things that even American scholars generally aren't aware of.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

all of Taibbi & Max Blumenthal's opinions are good and correct

Helsing posted:

Part of what makes the War Nerd great is the coverage of topics that rarely get discussed elsewhere, often with really interesting guests. Episodes I would particularly recommend to someone who is working through the show's backlog would be 29 (the Nagorno-Karabakh war, an interesting incident from the break up of the USSR), 40 (the Ethiopia-Eritrea War), anything with Karl Zha, and especially episdoe 76 where they interview the late Robert Parry, a very important American investigate journalist who helped break some of the biggest stories of the 1980s on Reagan's dirty war in south America. The Joshua Landis interview in episode 118 was a really interesting Afrin-centric episode on Syria and 117 on the bizarre history of the MEK in Iran is worth a listen.

quote:

At the center of Pistachio Wars are two Beverly Hills billionaires — Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

He has old mob ties. She’s a child of Hollywood whose dad produced The Blob. They live in the biggest, flashiest mansion in Beverly Hills. They hang out with celebrities, give to charities, and have Stephen Colbert pitching their products on TV.

They’re farmers — the biggest and most powerful in California. They have a monopoly on America's booming pistachio market. They’re also water barons. They control more water than the entire population of Los Angeles uses in one year — that’s 4 million people.

For years, they’ve been bending California‘s political system to their will — privatizing water to feed the growth of their farming empire in the desert.

Their latest plan is to weaponize the panic surrounding California’s drought to grab the state’s most valuable water asset: two great rivers that feed into the San Francisco Bay. It’s a heist of epic proportions — it will put family farms out of business, and push life in the biggest river estuary on the west coast of America towards mass extinction.

THS posted:

someone else can probably explain it better, but gary brecher is a persona, not just a pen name. his war need columns used to be way more over the top and near satire

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I can distinctly remember the last two times this happened. The first was right after The Exile had to flee Russia and they were growing their roots back into the US (and Mark was still doing speed). Mark & Yasha were the first journalists to expose that the Koch Brothers were astroturfing the Tea Party movement, and then all of a sudden there was a big right wing push to discredit them for being sexists and rapists - which was coming from disgusting mutants like Jim Goad of all people. Then it was what, last year or a couple years ago? They did the same thing because Matt Taibbi was getting too popular.

It almost happened a third time because Mark Ames did the funky chicken dance on Andrew Breitbart's grave, but it petered out because I guess the guys who took over after Breitbart died were too busy trying to keep the company together.

Nothus posted:

I'm surprised we didn't get another round of handwringing when Yasha was making the rounds with his water wars article and Kickstarter. That throw away line about him being a soviet citizen is pretty weak sauce. I guess Mark and Matt just have a knack for knowing which beehive to kick.

Phone posted:

~~~~ tHiNk PrOgReSs ~~~~

pangstrom posted:

Thomas Whigham was a good guest but he had pretty advanced case of professor disease. Not as patronizing as that Africa reporter guy (Jeffrey Gettleman?), but definitely used to running a conversation with 20 year olds, making a meal over correcting the minor misstatements of assistant professors etc.