Running Iron Report

It would be hard to overstate how much I love Thanksgiving. An autumn family feast day with underpinnings of historical remembrance seems purpose‐built to trip my trigger — and it always does. It is even more important to me now that it means trekking across the Cascades to retrieve daughter Ceili from university. The drive is a beautiful one, made … Read More

Washington, Monday, Nov. 11, 2:48 A.M.–The armistice between Germany, on the one hand, and the allied Governments and the United States, on the other, has been signed. The State Department announced at 2:45 o’clock this morning that Germany had signed. The department’s announcement simply said: “The armistice has been signed.” The world war will end this morning at 6 o’clock, … Read More

Take some time this Sunday, November 11, to reflect upon a moment that occurred exactly 100 years ago. It made the world we live in. In November 1918, at the 11th hour* of the 11th day of the 11th month, an Armistice went into effect between the Allied powers of France, Great Britain and the United States and the newly‐formed … Read More

We are fast approaching the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I — known then as The Great War. It was the most cataclysmic conflict in human history up to that time, and it is almost inconceivable that it would be superseded in a mere 30 years by an even more horrific one. Americans are not much … Read More

In a consumer society, where so much of what we require for daily life forces us into roles of utter dependence upon complex, fragile, and unaccountable systems, there are few remaining outlets that allow us at least the illusion of self‐sufficiency. Hunting is one of them.

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The recent kerfuffle over politician Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test proving that she has Native American blood (a degree denoting a likely ancestor dating back from the early 19th Century) is a fine illustration of the continuity and persistence of the American fixation on race. I will leave it to others to parse the implications of the unseemly politics of this … Read More

In this inaugural segment of Running Iron on the Road, Craig shares thoughts and music from a trip to the central highlands of Mexico. … Read More

“A tongue can accuse and carry bad news The seeds of distrust it will sow But unless you’ve made no mistakes in your life Be careful of stones that you throw… — Hank Williams, “Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw” * This is how this rolls: Somebody, somewhere, with an ax to grind digs up some stupid thing someone … Read More

Readers of this site generally accept the proposition that our American experiment in self‐government is taking on water.  I would argue that, all things considered, the ship is actually beginning to list heavily under the combined weight of a wholly unaccountable administrative state, a surreal burden of debt we will leave to our grandchildren as a kind of cynical stocking stuffer, third‐world education standards, tribal strife stoked by retail journalism, a new and prevailing cultural adulation of the victim mentality, meme‐think politics, and a Congress that is more or less directed by the parasitic whims of a guild economy.

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In this episode of the Running Iron Podcast Craig, Jim, and Oil Can are joined in the bunkhouse by Austin, Texas, resident Rick Schwertfeger.  Rick is a retired public health professional who has also become a regular contributor to both Frontier Partisans and Running Iron Report.  Rick sits down to discuss internet dating, former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s shooting prowess, and his studies of frontier life during the American War for independence.

As a bonus, the Running Iron boys are also joined by Miami Firefighter, and former US Marine, Carlos Constanzo.  Carlos talks about his family’s experience before, during, and after the Castro takeover of Cuba.

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