Don’t you love a farce? My fault, I fear I thought that you’d want what I want Sorry my dear But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns Don’t bother They’re here — Stephen Sondheim, Send In The Clowns I guess I find it reassuring that the current efforts to muzzle free speech are being conducted by clowns. The announcement of a Department […]
About Jim Cornelius
Fifty Years Ago…
Been doing a little work for the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, one of the most significant events in modern American political history. The aftershocks of the botched political espionage operation that ultimately brought down the Nixon presidency continue to reverberate today, as evidenced by the persistent tendency to attach the suffix “gate” to any […]
The End Of Globalization
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will not cause deglobalization; it is a symptom of deglobalization. — Peter Zeihan Since we started RIR, Rullman and I have been trying to suss out the shape of the end of civilization as we know it. We’ve noted before that the “end of civilization” is not necessarily — or even likely — […]
The Great American
There’s a good case to be made that America would not exist as the nation we know without Benjamin Franklin. In 1778, France concluded a formal alliance with the newly declared United States of America — and it was Franklin who almost single-handedly engineered that geopolitical coup. The alliance provided America with critical arms and financing and, eventually, […]
Shaved By A Drunken Barber’s Hand
I don’t need to read the papers To know the heart of man This world’s been shaved By a drunken barber’s hand — Slaid Cleaves/Rod Picott, Drunken Barber’s Hand Last weekend, Slaid Cleaves returned to Sisters to play The Belfry. The Austin, Texas based singer-songwriter works in a tradition of folk songwriting and storytelling that celebrates the courage and resilience of ordinary folk […]
‘The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning’
Rullman must have thought I had over-caffeinated Friday afternoon. I took a late lunch break and went out to Zimmerman Butte for some kettle-bell-and-gunpowder therapy, and on the way out there I fired up the latest episode of Jack Carr’s Danger Close Podcast, featuring geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan. As soon as I pulled into the Pit, I pulled out the phone and […]
Post-American Homesick Blues
A friend recently gifted me a subscription to The Economist. That was a very nice thing to do. I think. The upside is that I can learn from that publication’s always-excellent, in-depth analysis of the way the economic engines that turn the world run — or don’t. The downside is that, right now, such analysis is a good way to […]
The Myth Of The Chess Master
* For years a mythology has accreted around Vladimir Putin. Both admirers and detractors in the West have seen him as a calculating genius, playing three-dimensional chess while everyone else was playing checkers. RIR never bought that analysis. We did see Putin as a cunning opportunist, parlaying strategic ambiguity and incremental bites at the periphery of the West […]
They Can’t Hang Us All
* The Establishment of the Empire of Nothing is losing their shit. At least that’s the way I choose to interpret the tea leaves this morning. The organism that is the neo-liberal nexus of government, Big Tech/Big Corp, and academia is feeling an environmental threat that it cannot understand, and it is beginning to lash out. “If […]
The Roosting Chickens Of Disinformation
One of the head-scratchers that I’ve been confronting over the past two years of COVID-19 is the sudden propensity of previously skeptical folks to insist that we have to take the U.S. government at its word on everything from the origins of the pandemic to the effectiveness of masks and vaccines. ***Obligatory note: I am vaccinated and […]
Maximum Zuckage
“I know it’s preposterous — but is it preposterous?” — CNN host Don Lemon I pretty much gave up on CNN back in 2014, when I read an interview with then-new honcho Jeff Zucker, in which he explained that CNN’s news/business model, built to compete with ratings juggernaut FOX News, was going to be picking a single story […]
Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World
Oh, this country sure looks good to me But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail. — Neil Young I love me some Neil Young. Saw him live a bunch of times in some truly epic concerts— rocking with Crazy Horse, solo acoustic; the whole wild, erratic, eccentric range from the deep Americana of Harvest Moon to a bone-crunching Sedan Delivery. […]
