The Long Trail of Posts

While filming the Len Babb Movie Project – we are eight months into this endeavor and making tremendous progress – cinematographer Sam Pyke and I have covered thousands of miles, visited six states, and interviewed some truly incredible Americans …
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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 …
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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 …
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Mark me! Today marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Charles Edward Stuart. Known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, he kicked off the last Jacobite Rebellion in 1745, in the attempt to see the exiled Stuart Dynasty Restored to the …
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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 …
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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 …
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A few miles south of La Pine, Oregon, highway 97 offers travelers the opportunity to turn hard east onto highway 31.  At this sudden intersection in the ponderosas – it is easily missed – there is a small sign welcoming …
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Last week, while most of Big America was flailing about in a toxic stew of mind-numbing polemics, Murphy Ranch buckaroo Tyler Mecham was following wolf tracks up Dairy Creek. Tyler is 19 years old, 6’3, with Modoc blood in his …
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We were riding up above it all, miles from the Murphy’s cow camp at South Flat in blowdown timber, when I saw the zucchinis.  I can maybe be forgiven some momentary confusion – we’d been riding hard for several hours, …
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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 …
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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 …
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 “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 …
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I’ll keep it brief because a steaming summer thunderstorm has parked over the top of the Figure 8 and I need to spend some serious time on fire watch.  I’d meant to ride my colt this afternoon, and continue roping …
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Things are weird in the USA — and over the next few months they are going to get weirder. I find it necessary to lay out where I stand and the line I will walk as we turn and turn …
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“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.” — Edward Abbey …
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Part of the natural evolution — and devolution — of language is that useful terms of art gain popular acceptance and then are debased through overuse. This process is accelerated in the sticky, humid and overwrought hothouse conditions of cultural …
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