Brian's Column-Article
9/11 Truth and the Grand Awakening
The cathartic potential 911 Memorialof unraveling the Big Lie
(1st posted 12/10/07)

As members of the 9/11 truth movement—let’s define the 9/11 truth movement (911TM) as the widespread popular campaign to discover the unfettered facts about what happened on 9/11/01, to determine who was responsible for the crime, and to mete out justice to these people—we need to be aware of deep psychological resistance to looking at the evidence with an independent mind.  (Let’s also point out in this context that most 911T people at this stage are not calling for committing immediate street justice on tyrants, instead rallying for an impartial citizens’ grand-jury investigation with subpoena powers.) [Full Column]

Donut Hole
Taking Shots
Dream suggests Obamacare as screwy fantasy

But I’m going to try again today, to stay light and away from politics, taking my comments from a dream so vivid I immediately rose to write it down: I’m in a doctor’s office and instead of being given a shot in my arm by the doctor, he hands me two syringes and tells me that getting a shot today is the same as my delivering these shots into someone else’s arms. I’m to treat the syringes carrying my medicine as spears and everyone in the waiting room as a subject for my medical pokefest. The first one comes off my hand like a rocket but misses my target, this couple sitting roughly 15 feet from me. Instead it impales a waste basket violently up against the base of a water cooler. “Whoa,” I say to myself, “I’d better take it easy, don’t want to hurt anyone.” [Full Review]

Movie Review
Swing Shift (1984)
Small WWII movie with big-budget impact

This movie belongs to the women, particularly Kay Walsh (Goldie Hawn) and Hazel (Christine Lahti), who following Pearl Harbor Day were thrust into a change of life in obvious ways… then soon realized they were changing, as women, in ways that couldn’t have been obvious to anyone at the time.  World War II: Probably no event in history combined the collective awareness of a (arguably) free people into such an enormous scale of supreme cooperation for a cause.  All the compulsions—from the draft, to rationing, to censorship—were generally accepted without question, and people voluntarily sacrificed of themselves in time, money, and energy to support the soldiers. [Full Review]

Book Review
Notes on the Debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (1987)
by James Madison

All right, unless you have access to some primo bud (really smooth marijuana conducive to cognition), reading this book may prove to be tedious business. Candidly, it needs to be considered a reference, quite an amazing reference, to the founding document of the American nation. Necessarily, a great deal of the back and forth concerns procedural matters, such as how many senators, reps, terms of office, judicial powers, general composition, qualifications, impeachability, and so on. And these questions are of interest to scholars certainly, to laymen as well. For example, you learn fairly quickly that the high-population states and low-population states tended to have opposed objectives: mainly that the one group should not be allowed to run roughshod over the other. [Full Review]

Guest Column
Detroit Breakdown
Notes from some East Side kids back in the day
by Rose Wright

I was raised in Detroit’s inner-city in the 50s, back then a richly ethnic Italian/Polish/ German neighborhood of high-work-ethic hard-working people with great values. I remember Detroit’s Golden Years- its crowded downtown streets, working in its fabulous soaring buildings back when it seemed an exciting place to live, a ‘glam’ city — touting both the nation’s first expressway (the John C Lodge, and also first enclosed ‘mall’ in the entire country — Northland. I was thrilled when relatives took me to see the new Metro airport. I even remember the (ding-ding!) street cars and my sadness when they became defunct... until the late 60s... [Full Column]

Quote of the Week

"A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection---not an invitation for hypnosis." — Umberto Eco, 1979