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Our Predator Problem

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The common denominator in school killings isn’t what you think it is.  It isn’t guns, and it isn’t mental illness.  The only common denominator in mass school killings is long-term, dissasociative exposure to violent media.

Whether its violence in films, violent lyrics, violent television shows, violent novels, violence depicted across social media, or the endless flood of violent imagery in first-person shooter video games, those countless hours steeped in images of interpersonal violence are damaging the minds of our nation’s children.

Population of One, by Lt. Colonel Dan Zappa

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“You aren’t going to quit.”  It was not the reaction I wanted from my father. As we drove to little league baseball practice, he looked straight ahead without emotion as I sat tearfully next to him.  The practice would bring more torture for me.  The year before I was a strong contributor to a solid, developing team, now I wanted out and to be free from the hostile environment.

Let It Run

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Last week I took some time off from working the colt, writing, and fixing the myriad things around the Figure 8 that broke in the last big snowstorm.  I put all that away for a three-day fishing trip down the Lower Deschutes.  I went with my friend, neighbor, and legendary guide Steve Erickson, and an old cop colleague who has spent much of his adult life working violent crimes – a grueling career that has left his armor severely dented by the sword and axe-blows of human behavior.

Military Suicide Part 2, by Greg Walker

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Spec. 4 James Christian “Frosty” Paquette attended Irmo High School and finished at Chapin High School. He overcame a serious head trauma from a car accident in April 1990. He went on to be a Corrections Officer with the S.C. Dept. of Corrections, then earned a two-year degree from Midlands Technical College and became a licensed electrician. He entered the South Carolina. […]

Up From 34 Blues

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If there is one principle I am steadfast to uphold, it’s that a man’s waist size should always be smaller than his inseam.  If your inseam is 36, and you wake up to find your waist is a 38, you have crossed the bridge into a contrary life.

Wagyu, With a Side of Rage

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Each year on St. Patrick’s Day my wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary.  18 years ago on St. Patrick’s day we eloped and were married at the Chapel of the Bells on 4thStreet in Reno.  Ten minutes earlier there had been a funeral in the same chapel, and I was so broke I couldn’t even afford the VHS tape of the nuptials.  Two decades later I wouldn’t change a thing.

Cool Water

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Out here in the mountain west water is always precious, particularly when living on the east side of any of the hundreds of mountain ranges between the Sierra-Cascades and the Rockies.  Out here, the east side of anything is always the drier side, the rain-shadow side, and so eastsiders live within a perpetual loop of drought and diminishing returns. The diminishing returns are a result of aggressive settlement beyond the 100thMeridian, which is desert, and has been a desert since before the end of the last Ice Age.

Give A Drunk A Drink

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My weekly Thursday RIR post was delayed due to the Great Snow of ’19. As you read in Craig’s post “Meditations In White,” Sisters was walloped by a mighty winter storm at the beginning of the week. I got up at 5:30 a.m. on Monday to this charming sight: That’s my truck under there. One of the juniper […]

Meditations in White

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I stopped believing the weather woman about 2 months ago.  This was a deliberate act of rebellion because riding the prediction roller coaster was damaging my nerves and upsetting the dogs. Calls for snow this winter have too often dissembled into blue skies, warm chinooks, and mud in the paddocks, and although I have sympathy for anyone who signs up to predict the weather in Central Oregon my stores of good humor were used up three fake storms ago.

An Ace in the Hole

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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

Fear

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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.

Apostate Blues

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Readers of this site generally accept the proposition that our American experiment in self-government is taking on water.  I would argue that, all things considered, the ship is actually beginning to list heavily under the combined weight of a wholly unaccountable administrative state, a surreal burden of debt we will leave to our grandchildren as a kind of cynical stocking stuffer, third-world education standards, tribal strife stoked by retail journalism, a new and prevailing cultural adulation of the victim mentality, meme-think politics, and a Congress that is more or less directed by the parasitic whims of a guild economy.