The brilliant Running Iron Report piece I spent a couple of days on turned out to be a piece of crap, so I junked it. A high volume Russian Kettlebell workout in 36-degree temperatures kicked my ass. Watching a couple of hours of impeachment hearing over a fantastic lunch with my friend Jack McGowan was good fellowship, but bad for my cynicism. […]
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 […]
‘New Molds Want To Be Filled With Blood’
“This war is not the end but the beginning of violence. It is the forge in which the world will be hammered into new borders and new communities. New molds want to be filled with blood, and power will be wielded with a hard fist.” — Ernst Jünger (1918) The dramatic events of recent weeks — […]
‘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 […]
Down Into The Mire — The Hard Men Of The War Of Irish Independence
There is nothing more stirring and romantic than a people’s fight for independence. Who cannot be moved by an underdog taking up the rifle to make a stand and be counted in the community of nations? And yet the reality of revolution — and the civil war that it seems must almost inevitably follow — is grim, […]
The Attempted Murder Of The First Amendment
The president is a man of tremendous and highly sensitive ego, and he feels himself under constant and bitterly unfair attack. The world is full of tumult — and Fake News. The year is 1798. The French Revolution has plunged Europe into bloody conflict. The fledgling United States is itself embroiled in an undeclared maritime shooting […]
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.
It’s A Nice Day For A Red Wedding
Americans have a skewed image of what civil war entails, mainly because ours was somewhat exceptional, if not unique. Two vast geographical regions squared off and went at it in a large-scale conventional war featuring classical Napoleonic movement of great armies and titanic battles like Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga and the sieges of Vicksburg and Petersburg. Victory or […]
Lies, Damn Lies And False Narratives
Two presidential candidates did a very bad thing last weekend: They are promulgating a false narrative — a narrative that was comprehensively debunked by the investigation and report of the Obama Justice Department in 2015. The report is readily available online. Brown’s killing may have been tragic — nobody wants to see a young man’s life snuffed out — but […]
A Giant Leap
“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong, Commander, Apollo 11 July 20 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most remarkable moments in human history. Astronaut Neil Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar landing module Eagle and stepped out onto the surface of the Moon. […]
High Drama in Little High Rock
On February 26, 1911, in a winter so cold across northern Nevada that temperatures dropped to ‑40°, four men rode quietly into the frozen maw of Little High Rock Canyon to investigate the carcasses of cattle recently killed and left in the snow. Little High Rock Canyon, in 1911, was as it remains today: a long way from anywhere. Closest to Eagleville, California, LHR is situated in the sagebrush, alkali, and basalt country of northwest Nevada. It is home to bighorn sheep, many species of raptors, deer, pronghorn, rattlesnakes, chukar, quail, coyotes, horned toads, and wild horses. Summers are blazing hot, and winters are unremitting.
The Last Czars
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. — Winston Churchill Regular readers of Running Iron Report know that we consider the Russian Revolution to be a fulcrum of modern history. Taken not as a discreet event but as a part of the great convulsion of the First World War and a precursor event of the Second World War, […]
