Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit? To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except “deportees”? — Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) by Woody Guthrie “You think change is the goal? […]
Practicing History (And Sex Magick)
My brain tends to behave like a .22 bullet: Thoughts ricochet around and wind up in weird places where they shouldn’t be. You’ve heard the stories: Guy gets shot in the right ankle and that little 40-grain pill bounces around and pops out his left eyeball; that’s how it works. This is NOT a systematic or […]
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part IV — The Long Reach Of The Secret Elite
Cecil Rhodes dreamed the Secret Society — Alfred Milner gave it life. A journalist and then a colonial administrator, Milner was the perfect man to take up leadership of Rhodes’ Secret Society, for he was as ardent a “British Race patriot” as Rhodes himself, and considerably more capable when it came to pulling political strings. He bent […]
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part III — The Secret Elite Stumbles Out Of The Gate
A cabal of wealthy and/or politically and socially connected Englishmen — a “Secret Elite” — forms in 1891 to ensure Anglo-Saxon domination of the world as it enters the 20th Century. They seek a federated Empire — the white dominions acting as partners with the Mother Country — and the recovery of the United States. To achieve these ends, […]
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part II — The Quest For Ophir
Cecil Rhodes was one of the worlds richest men, having acquired his fortune through amalgamating diamond claims in Kimberley, South Africa, to create a monopoly that continues to dominate the trade to this day. He made a second fortune in the world’s richest gold field on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. He was a Robber Baron in a Gilded Age […]
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part I
Cecil Rhodes did much to shape the world we live in — yet even well-educated people in the U.S. and the UK scarcely know his name. Perhaps they’re aware of Rhodes Scholarships or have heard that there was a campaign to remove his statues in South Africa because of his legacy of racial division and oppression. But […]
The Kids Are Alright
One of the perils of doing the work that we do at The Running Iron Report is that there’s a tendency to focus on the negative. While we’re certainly about diagnosing the illnesses of the Empire, our true purpose is scouting out a path to a worthy, honorable way of living in these strange times. We cannot afford […]
Skynet Is Listening
DON’T LET THIS TECHNOLOGY INTO YOUR HOME! From The Daily Beast: Amazon Alexa allegedly recorded a Portland family’s private conversation and sent the audio to a person in their contact list, KIRO 7 reported. Danielle, who declined to use her last name, said she recently received a call from her husband’s employee, who told her: “Unplug your Alexa devices right now. […]
Intent To Destroy — Acts Of Defiance
My wife Marilyn has a thing about Anthony Bourdain. It’s not a celebrity crush, exactly. She says she wants to be him when she grows up. And who can blame her? The guy has a pretty extraordinary gig, wandering the world, exploring cultures and conflicts, with food and as a focal point and an extended cultural metaphor. The May 20 […]
Crumbling Colossus
Looks like the punditry is catching up to a principle that underpins The Running Iron Report’s worldview: The Imperial Colossus is just too damn big. In a May 11 op-ed in The New York Times, sociology professor Neil Gross notes that: Last month the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that Americans are losing faith in their system of […]
The Widening Gyre, Berlin Edition
My wife Marilyn and I have spent evenings of late in the weird and wild metropolis that was Berlin in 1929. After being besieged by rave reviews from people I respect, we fired up the Netfix and dived into Babylon Berlin, the international hit German TV series. It’s supposedly the most expensive production in German history, and it […]
Nannies Run Amok
My life was shaped by tramping through forests, mountains and deserts. That may be an exceptional thing for someone who grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the latter half of the 20th century, but it is true. When I was 3–1/2 years old, my little sister Cathie was born with severe cerebral palsy. She would […]
