The Long Trail of Posts

While out delivering The Nugget recently, I listened to an episode of the American Spy Museum’s Spycast podcast, featuring Ric Prado. Enrique Prado was a covert CIA operative in Central America in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration sought to …
Read More

When the poet John Berryman leapt off a bridge in Minneapolis he was sober. He’d been largely drunk up until that morning but he was scarred forever by his own father’s suicide and probably every tall building looked something like …
Read More

We showed up early because we expected a crowd. We were right. There had been a bird nest over the front door to the Montana Club but in the opening hubbub, not nearly as violent as a Black Friday crush …
Read More

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 …
Read More

I won’t bore you with details of 18 hours in delayed flights, an unexpected stay in Denver, or any of the weird third-world adventures accompanying domestic travel that are now routine in modern, robust, and according to President Joe Biden, …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

There’s a good case to be made that America would not exist as the nation we know without Benjamin Franklin. In 1778, France concluded a formal alliance with the newly declared United States of America — and it was Franklin …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

* 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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

* 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 …
Read More

It is axiomatic that all tactical training that is any good must involve rubber boats and cold water. If your training does not include rubber boats and cold water you cannot possibly be training for anything more rigorous than seizing …
Read More

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 …
Read More