UPDATE: According to NYT, Amélie Wen Zhao has decided to go ahead and publish her book. That’s a win. The whole mentality needs to be scorched in dragon fire. * A social media lynch mob killed a book last month. The vampire vigilantes slew a dream, too, in a lustful feeding frenzy that must have given a whole set of keyboard […]
The Digital Dictatorship
Nobody can talk to anybody because everybody has been sucked away on the algorithms meant to charge the dopamine response in their brains, and they are almost incapable of entertaining information that comes from outside of the bubble that AI has created for them based on their own preferences. The effects of digital isolation are so bad that an entire industry now exists merely to re‐teach human beings how to sit down in the same room and have a conversation.
Manning Up Is Hard To Do
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good […]
Misdirection In The Motte & Bailey
If you feel like your values and your very nature are under assault — they are. Two things happened on the same day last week that provide ample evidence that values and life‐ways we cleave to here at Running Iron Report are under concerted and deliberate attack. The American Psychological Association has released new guidelines for […]
The Great American Freak‐Out
If the now ubiquitous American Freak Out is evidence of anything, perhaps it is a symptom of our lives on the new frontier. Maybe it’s happening because we are culturally marooned, neither here nor there just yet, but rather groaning through the death agonies of the old myths that once sustained us, while fighting savagely over the invention and control of the new myths we will eventually live by.
The Sacred And The Profane
For me, the rifle is sacred. Some of you will readily accept that statement; maybe it’s sacred for you, too. Some may think that “sacred” is pushing things too far. Some of you will recoil (sorry) in disgust. We all have our sacred objects, whether we pin that loaded term on them or not. Really, […]
An Ace in the Hole
Over the years I have paid particular attention to my family history. Not because my family is in any way unique from anyone else’s, only that from a very young age I have been imbued with an abiding appreciation for the experiences of my ancestors. I’ve wanted to know them, or at least about them, and so maybe learn something about myself as I’ve traveled through this life. And it is the Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri branches of my family — Norwegians, Germans, and Dutch — who all wound up farther west at one point or another, that I have learned the most about
SPQR — The Senate and People of Rome
This year has been a particularly good one for those of us who are interested in old Rome, as new discoveries of letters, and even boxing gloves, at Hadrian’s Wall – a strange wall, indeed, for a host of reasons – and in fresh diggings at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Oplontis, all destroyed by Vesuvius back in ’79 – have given us valuable new information about Roman life, culture, and reach, and indeed have overturned some apple carts.
Fear
There are people among us who think they have all the answers. They don’t. Blowhards and know‐it‐alls, particularly those of the political stripe, are really just people overcome by fright who have morphed into frenzied tent‐revivalists, and who would love to baptize you in the church of their own nightmares.
‘If I Don’t Stop, Who’s Going To?’
This week, I had the pleasure of writing a story about a good deed. The construction manager of a major project here in Sisters, Oregon, rescued a family that had run off the road in the Cascades and ended up in their wrecked truck, upside down in the North Santiam River. You can read the full story here. The key […]
Time To Shake These Doomsayer Blues
It’s the same old story Tell me where will it end I got the same old blues, same old blues again — J.J. Cale * I’m gonna lay down these Doomsayer Blues. The fourth National Climate Assessment under the U.S. Global Change Research program was released on the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend — the traditional […]
The Tao of Barnes
I was having coffee with Jim the other day down in Sisters town, at a fine greasy spoon called The Gallery, which up until a few weeks ago had a fine collection of old rifles hung up on the walls, and where a regular collection of regular guys gather most mornings at the counter to stare down the pies and get their daily dose of good cheer from the gals working the counter. The Gallery serves a heap of great diner food for not a lot of money, if you are into that sort of thing, and they still have a wooden indian in the entryway which is a throwback to an era not long ago where not every statue was automatically a symbol of racist domination.
