James Richard Brett

Welcome to Iron Mountain.

I have been interested in world politics since I was ten and delivering newpapers in suburban Washington, D.C. My interest in Russia, specifically, began when I discovered that some of my ancestors had come from part of the Russian Empire. Growing up at ground zero of the Cold War three miles from the Pentagon was doubtlessly important, too. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia I majored in History with a Concentration on Russia and the Soviet Union. As a Naval officer I was a collateral duty Intelligence Officer. By the time I was completing the work for the doctoral degree in Russian History at UCLA I was also studying the history of ideas, scientific and political. I gave a keynote speech in 1997 at the Moscow Medical Academy named for Ivan M. Sechenov, which is now called the First Moscow Medical University named for I.M. Sechenov.

World and American politics are endlessly interesting and often very annoying. I wrote here and elsewhere* about contemporary events and ideas for many years and stopped abruptly in 2011 to provide for my own security (among other things on the advice of Three Percenter white surpremicist persons who disagreed with me and told me literally to "arm myself"). I read in the NYT later that the DoJ/FBI paid these persons a visit.

It is important for me to keep my perspective on the dramas of our day and to portray them with candor and with several points of view clearly in mind. I am always curious, a Progressive Liberal, a Skeptic, an Idealist, a Pragmatist, a Hamiltonian, and an Optimist, all despite a lot of evidence that things are not going well here and abroad. I hope you enjoy my essays. I will announce them on Facebook and Twitter.

JB

* — Elsewhere" was principally The American Liberalism Project, the essays of which have been lost except those I shared with OpEdNews, where my OpEdNews archives page still exists.