My 95-year-old dad never saw a construction project he didn’t like. A child of the Great Depression and World War II, development to him has always signaled growing prosperity, more people accessing an American Dream he fervently believed in. And why wouldn’t he? The 10th of 11 children of a Swedish father and an Irish mother who came […]
About Jim Cornelius
American Apocalypse
A few months before we moved to Sisters, Oregon, in 1993, my wife Marilyn and I — along with the rest of the nation — were transfixed by the news that came out of Waco, Texas. On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) raided the compound of a religious cult known as […]
‘I’ll Take Hypersonic Nekkid Apartment-Cleaning For $20k’
Every once in a while, I’m in the mood for some over-the-top mad-science/military-horror mayhem. When the mood is upon me, I turn to Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger series. They’re a hoot. Here’s the very first caper — Patient Zero: When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there’s either something wrong with your world […]
White Hats, Black Hats
While out delivering The Nugget recently, I listened to an episode of the American Spy Museum’s Spycast podcast, featuring Ric Prado. Enrique Prado was a covert CIA operative in Central America in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration sought to build an insurgency to overthrow the Communist Sandinista regime, which had come to power in a revolution against […]
Hey Big Sister! Send In The Clowns
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 […]
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 […]
