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 — […]
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 […]
The Bell, Book, and Candle Blues
Putin is, of course, a kind of Great Khan and the oligarchs he has both made and sustained will substitute nicely for the lesser Khans. What unites them through time isn’t just wealth or extravagance or absolute power, it is a world view, and Putin’s embrace of Eurasianism should have been heeded by successive American and European administrations but wasn’t.
Horse Storms
Perhaps most ominously in this interview, Hill was asked if we are on the brink of World War III. Her answer: “We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War…All of the conflicts we are seeing have roots in earlier conflicts…people shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.”
The Tracksuit Resistance
I have never been to Ukraine, though I did stumble across some Ukrainian mail-order brides in my former profession. Called to resolve domestic disputes by their awe-struck American husbands, I can assure you I was most impressed by the tenacity of the women who came over on the promise of Levis, western cigarettes, and fine weather.
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 […]
