U.S. intelligence officials have little comfort to offer a pandemic-weary planet about where the world is heading in the next 20 years. Short answer: It looks pretty bleak. — The Washington Post, April 8, 2021 There is supposed to be some cold satisfaction in being able to say “I told you so.” I’m not feeling that, and I’m […]
Bootlegging the Imaginarium
I’ve been trying to figure out how it is I will navigate the asteroid belts of the Imaginarium – dodging the tumbling balls of frozen wokeness, the careening boulders of political duplicity and outright stupidity. In that process I’ve come to realize that in order to survive these hazards, and to pilot my family through them into what will certainly be some kind of mincing, fragile, and thoroughly deconstructed American future influenced, if not controlled, by the Chinese Communist Party, I must adopt at least some and maybe all of the mindset of the Star Wars smuggler and anti-hero Han Solo.
Incitement To Riot
My wife Marilyn and I recently finished Season 2 of Cinemax’s martial arts pulp fest, Warrior. Inspired by a concept written down in notes by Bruce Lee many years ago, and heavily influenced by Quentin Tarantino, the adventure follows a Chinese immigrant to San Francisco in the 1870s, where he becomes a tong soldier and is embroiled in the tong […]
Treason And The Cold Comforts Of History
The tumult and turmoil of the past year have sent me back to the 18th century, to the roots of our battered Republic. It’s been a comforting sojourn — but not in the ways one might expect. There’s not much to be gained from revisiting hoary myths of the Founding; the real flesh-and-blood history is much more challenging, […]
The Baying Of The Hounds
The hounds are baying for blood. Beware. The leashes that hold them back are frayed, and, once loosed they will rend and tear any caught in their path. * The framers of the Constitution were not idealists and utopians; quite the opposite — they were skeptics of the perfectibility of man. Knowing that a lust for domination […]
Revolution, Riot And Rock-And-Roll — Part II — A Crisis Of Legitimacy
Over the holidays, the House of Cornelius rode down a side trail into the Wars of the Roses. The Wars of the Roses were a series of civil wars that ripped England apart for 30 years from 1455 to 1485. The complexity of those three decades of instability, turmoil and extreme violence has been over-simplified into a dynastic struggle between […]
Somebody Bring Me Some Water
A couple of notes in the margin as the speed wobbles get more intense and the American Empire careens along the path to the Crash: The grotesque yet totally predictable spectacle of the Great Post-Election Tantrum has kicked up musings about civil war and secession. Most of this is is hot air from big talkers — […]
Revolution, Riot & Rock-and-Roll — Part I — The Gunpowder Plot
I know, it’s only rock and roll But I like it… — Jagger/Richards Lo, these many years ago — decades, actually, which is disconcerting — my then-girlfriend became Very Upset because her science major roommates scorned her major in English literature. They considered their majors — and therefore themselves — Practical , Useful, and Important. An English […]
The Heroic Age
Twice in the same day I saw the concept of the “heroic” badly misunderstood. When that sort of thing happens, I figure it’s time for a RIR post. The first was in the context of the passing at the age of 81 of Texas songwriting legend and larger-than-life wild man Billy Joe Shaver. “Trigger” the keeper of the […]
You Say You Want La Revolution
Revolutions are a dangerous business. I suppose my instincts are inherently conservative (in the Edmund Burke sense) when it comes to this subject, because when people invoke the “to the barricades!” war cry of revolt and insurrection, I tend to recoil. It’s not so much the tumult and disorder of revolution that creates a sense of dread in me […]
UAW/MF — Incitement To Violence
“I want the entire world to burn until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician.” — Nathan Jun, Midwestern State University philosophy professor and “mild-mannered and conscientious member of his local community.” We’re back in “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” […]
1619 vs. 1776
“There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that America has a long history of brutal and shameful mistreatment of racial minorities — with black Americans its chief victims. And second, that America is a great nation, and that American citizens (and citizens of the world) should be grateful for its founding. Perhaps no nation […]
