Hey pards! The Running Iron Trading Post is open — you can now ride for the brand at coffeeshop or shooting range. (Link at the top of the page). The cap looks sharp on the range — and anecdotal evidence suggests that it actually improves your shooting. The stickers class up a guitar case or a laptop. […]
That Noble Northern Spirit
“I have in this War a burning private grudge — which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler … Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in […]
Off With Their Heads!
An ad campaign designed to get local folks thinking about east-west connectivity in Bend and encourage participation in a transportation survey has run afoul of cancel culture. The billboard that loomed over the intersection of 9th and Wilson depicted a covered wagon trekking across the high desert, with the tagline: “Traveling East to West still tough?” and […]
Killing the Beeves
There isn’t anything magical about regenerative ranching. The theories put forth by the gurus of holistic management, guys like Allan Savory, Johann Zietsman, Gabe Brown, and others, just make sense. It’s possible to build and repair our soils while raising food and actually improving environmental conditions over time. We know how to do this. But our models for worldwide economic growth all collide with doing anything that is healthy and endlessly repeatable.
A Reading Life
Our hometown of Sisters celebrated the reading life this month. The inaugural Sisters Festival of Books October 18–20 was a success on every level. Craig Rullman and I were honored to be asked to participate in the kickoff event, which featured a dozen local authors. There are few things more worthy of celebration than books and the strange […]
Pierre Delecto and Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
It’s interesting that so many politicians and bureaucrats, apparently lacking the strength of their convictions, are assuming noms de plume and making their little pithy appearances in the digital realm. Romney’s “Pierre Delecto” is a particularly daft touch, joining some other recent classics such as James Comey’s “Reinhold Niebuhr” and Anthony Weiner’s “Carlos Danger” as instant splashes of cowardice and evidence of active mushbrain.
‘The Marke Of His Manhood’
The quality we admire most at The Running Iron Report is resilience. Nobody escapes the injuries, the wrecks, the traumas big and small that life dishes out. The 21st century therapeutic culture, which often valorizes victimhood, has led us astray from old, heroic virtues, and indeed casts them in a negative light. But those are the […]
The Saga Of Whychus Creek
This is maybe the best story I know. It’s an antidote to cynicism, a case study in the ways in which vision, patience and mutual respect can create outcomes that benefit everybody involved — and enhance the health and beauty of this sweet old world. This story originally appeared in The Nugget’s publication Celebrate. Because if anything […]
The People I Didn’t Kill
In this case the question came from a young person, and they can be forgiven the crudity of their curiosity, even if it is backloaded with tired assumptions force fed by bad television, video games, abysmal schools, and that grandest of American traditions: the full criminal embrace. While the characterization of cops has migrated from the Officer Friendly types on Adam 12 to masked bogeymen in “tanks” fiendishly no-knocking the wrong house, outlaws and very bad people enjoy the fruits of selective judgment.
Civil Disobedience
If you are one of those rarified Americans who still believe, as this space fervently does, that natural rights are bequeathed to us by our creator, rather than granted to us by government masters, you will perhaps appreciate the gift of Robert Francis O’Rourke.
World Addicts Revolution: Green Beret Mike Mantenuto’s Legacy, by Greg Walker
Staff Sgt. Michael Mantenuto, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), took his own life on April 24, 2017.
The break-out star of the 2004 blockbuster Disney film “Miracle,” who became a Green Beret in 2013, had for years endured and fought against deeply entrenched behavioral health and substance dependency issues. Hospitalized for 28 days in 2015, Mantenuto returned to Fort Lewis, Washington, with great hope and a desire to help others like those he’d met over the previous month.
The Road of the Dead, Parts 3 and 4
South of Adel, Oregon, beyond the diminished headquarters of the MC Ranch, Twentymile Road offers a sharp eastward turnoff onto County Road 3–15. You take it, hitting the turn signal for no reason at all, pushing through irrigated pastures in the valley bottoms where the humidity is suddenly tropical and the smell of lush orchard grass, alfalfa, and timothy pours in through the open windows of the truck. You think: a rainforest sprinkled with dust.
