Author Archives: Brian Wright

About Brian Wright

Hello, I'm Brian Wright, the proprietor and chief content provider to this Web opinion and review site. The Coffee Coaster (thecoffeecoaster.com) has been around since late 2006, and in early 2012 I finally decided to give the site a major makeover with this Wordpress implementation. My views are 'wholistic libertarian,' meaning focused on the spiritual--I like to use the word: essentual--evolution we will need, individually, in order to reach the New Paradigm of peace, freedom, and abundance. Let's help one another in the process.

Movie Review: The Lookout (2007)

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Supremely crafted psychological drama____ 9/10
Written and directed by Scott Frank
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Joseph Gordon-Levitt … Chris Pratt
Jeff Daniels … Lewis
Matthew Goode … Gary Spargo
Isla Fisher … Luvlee
Carla Gugino … Janet
Bruce McGill … Robert Pratt

What a first-class effort: completely engaging from start to finish. I had read on IMDb one reviewer’s comments that’s it’s just nice to watch a movie that’s extremely well made, you know, as it all works together seamlessly to convey a meaningful story.

The actors are in top form as well, especially the young lead Joseph Gordon-Levitt who you’ll probably recognize as some child actor that you just know you’ve seen a million times.  He came of age recently in an interesting film noir effort Brick (2005), a story about a bizarre killing in a dysfunctional high-school environment.

Levitt plays a boy named Chris Pratt, who becomes a star high school athlete in a fictional Kansas farming town south of Kansas City. He’s fooling around one night on a double date in his convertible Mustang GT, which leads to a major accident. The couple in the back are killed, while he and his girlfriend suffer disabling injuries.

He winds up as janitor at the town bank and receives some public assistance both for his psychological damage—he has a hard time with things like remembering sequences of events and quantities; he’s bottled up his feelings—and for his physical restrictions, mainly pain and mobility related.  He has troubles with normal development of relationships with girls, illustrated by his hitting on his therapist Janet (Carla Gugino). Continue reading →

Guest Column: Boycott Big Brother?!

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Nine ways to stop cooperating with the ruling elite’s control system
By Paul Philips [Original piece here]

Editor’s Note: I found this courtesy Twitter, and it strikes a chord. Fitting in very smoothly with my First Principles and First Principles’ grand jury initiative. http://brianrwright.com/PRIME.pdf.

Done sneakily, or under the illusion of democracy, in recent times more oppressive laws have been made than ever before. Between us being subjected to more and more ordinances, rules, restrictions and outright laws then demonizing our dissension and opinion  should we object… It’s as if we can’t do anything right.

How long will it take for the masses to wake up to these grossly restricting laws and realize how un-free they are?  The masses’ unchallenging complacency with these laws has been made that much easier through social conditioning engineered over the years by the ruling elite.

In this charade, the power-mad egomaniac manipulating controlling parasitical ruling elite impose themselves on almost everything for their ulterior motives: ownership, power, profit and political gain – and that’s it. It’s that straightforward. It’s that pathetic.

These forever-increasing control mechanisms: regulations, rules, absurd mandates, threats of fines, intimidation, extreme petty police reprisals and imprisonment … are designed to sap the life-force from us while denying our true self-expression as we’re expected to bow down in acquiescence. It’s all designed to erode humanity into a subservient entity.

How do we break this manipulation? Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: 9/11 Truth EZ

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Logical consequences of facts undisputed by both sides of the Official Story
By Brian R. Wright

On my recent high school reunion I was pleased to get reacquainted with a boyhood friend who is now a retired United Airlines pilot and all around good guy. In a post-reunion email I ventured to him a simple question prompted by a pilot-posted Webpage that argued the impossibility that any of the alleged 9/11 hijackers could even fly any of the Boeing aircraft simulators: “Warren, I’m also wondering how the reported sea level airspeeds could have exceeded their respective aircraft’s VMO (maximum operating velocity) by huge margins.” He didn’t reply to the VMO question, but wrote that he had read a detailed and excellent argument somewhere explaining how the alleged hijackers could have accomplished what appear to be unbelievable—to the general public as well as to more than a few pilots—piloting tasks.

EZ Truths #1: The official story is physically/logically impossible

Many of you know that I’ve written about the 9/11/2001 attacks since roughly 2005, when I began to question the Official Story (OS)… thanks to a videotape, of all things, entitled Where’s the Plane? I just did a cursory look of the search engines and Amazon, and it appears that that tape and subsequent DVD have been scrubbed by the OSIC (Official Story Industrial Complex). No matter, volumes of hard evidence have been produced by reputable scholarly and citizen researchers since the fateful day that scuttle the 9/11 OS for all but the most reasoning-incapable or evasion-determined. I pointed my friend to the Pilots for 9/11 Truth site… and—staying with the aircraft evidence—here’s a table I drew from the groundbreaking video The New Pearl Harbor, by Massimo Mazzucco:

Continue reading →

Book Review: But Not for Me (2017)

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A 1930s Kansas City ‘star’ detective novel by Jack Kline
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

A sign of the times… or a rallying cry to break us free from the times? That is the question. What first-time-novel author Jack Kline has accomplished with But Not for Me is on par with any of the greats of the private eye genre—Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Tony Hillerman, Mickey Spillane, Stephen J. Cannell (TV: The Rockford Files),  and, of course, Elmore Leonard. Well, okay, these are my favorites, anyway… in an admittedly rather large universe of outstanding detective-story writers that I know very little about. Thus the question, for me, is will Kline’s uniquely splendid, soulful voice break thru the conforming conventional literary fare we’ve become used to these days and start yet another fertile and fun whodunit universe for ordinary yet uncommon blokes like yours truly?

I vote yes. With all the proper praise to Mr. Kline’s mentors and writers’ groups—or from wherever or whoever he was led to initiate the novel vocation—Kline and his first book are a wholly unexpected diamond of pure originality. He’s that good. that different, with that towering a potential. There is a very special quality in play with the But Not for Me creation that transcends its technical superlatives.

What is it that makes a novel good? Most readers and writers will answer with some combination of (appealing or well-executed) plot, character, dialog, evocation of setting, the writing itself (its sharpness, emotional depth, original phrasings, fitness to subject matter), and something I’ll just refer to as ‘sociological richness.’ BNFM has all these in spades. Plus, as a bonus, it’s completely politically incorrect, a throwback, really, to the old school, “man’s world” of hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-and-soft relations toward the fairer sex. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Bobby (2006)

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Bobby (2006)_______8/10
A touching (Robert) Altmanesque tribute

Directed by Emilio Estevez

Harry Belafonte…. Nelson
Joy Bryant…. Patricia
Nick Cannon…. Dwayne
Emilio Estevez…. Jim Fallon
Laurence Fishburne…. Edward Robinson
Brian Geraghty…. Cooper
Heather Graham…. Angela
Anthony Hopkins…. John Casey
Helen Hunt…. Samantha
Joshua Jackson…. Wade
Ashton Kutcher…. Fisher
Shia LaBeouf…. Jimmy
Lindsay Lohan…. Diane
William H. Macy…. Paul
Svetlana Metkina…. Lenka Janacek
Demi Moore…. Virginia Fallon
Freddy Rodríguez…. José
Martin Sheen…. Jack
Christian Slater…. Timmons
Sharon Stone…. Miriam
Jacob Vargas…. Miguel
Mary Elizabeth Winstead…. Susan Taylor
Elijah Wood…. William  

Movie critics have been all over the map on Bobby, some measuring it against the gold standard of ensemble-casted, social-ennui movies of Robert Altman, e.g. Nashville.  Well, it is that type of movie, a slice-of-life, journalistic recreation of an important day in history.

This is another nostalgic visit for me of a vein in the ideological gold mine I didn’t tap too much, but was aware others were deeply exploring.  I didn’t have the sensitivity in those days to appreciate what a fine and decent human being Bobby Kennedy actually was.

The fatal flaw, as far as I am concerned, for Bobby and many of the others on the Left is expressed in the following quote:

Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a
good motive. Neither powerlust nor stupidity are good
motives. — Ayn Rand Continue reading →

Guest Column: First Amendment Note

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Even ‘fake news’ is vital to our liberty
By Bob Livingston [Full original column here]

Part 2 of 2. Read the first part, “1st Amendment written to protect ‘fake news’“

Although the term “fake news” was not part of their lexicon, the Founding Fathers understood quite well the concept. As I discussed last week in “1st Amendment was written to protect fake news,” highly partisan editors used the power of their presses to disseminate their views with little concern over whether they were being truthful or even upheld basic standards of decorum.

Newspapers, pamphlets and broadsheets provided nourishment to both spark the American Revolution and keep it alive. Doubtless King George thought the ongoing lists of grievances colonial editors proclaimed against the crown were at best overblown if not outright lies.

As Ken Burns notes in his book , Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and The Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism:

Certainly the war would not have begun as soon as it did without the encouragement of the press. As New York Journal editor John Holt said on one occasion to Sam Adams, “It was by means of News papers that we receiv’d & spread the Notice of the tyrannical Designs formed against America, and kindled a Spirit that  has been sufficient to repel them.

And almost certainly, the war would not have ended with an American victory in a period of seven years from the first shot to signed treaty had not the newspapers – and some pamphlets – constantly reminded the colonists of the cause they shared, thereby inspiring the valor of soldiers and the patience and support of civilians.

The British knew it, too. The Boston Gazette was the only paper on their hit list before the war began, but as battles raged and patriot prose became ever more the tie that bound the colonies into a makeshift nation, the British set upon print shops as they did stray battalions of colonial militia. Sometimes, rather than wrecking the supplies and equipment, they stole them and delivered them to Tory publishers for more sympathetic use.

Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Three Dreams

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Sharing three powerful dreams behind First Principles and Independent Being
By Brian R. Wright

My latest project(s) are the First Principles Foundation, First Principles’ grand juries, and the corresponding Independents’ Movement…. all of which ideas were hinted at in my 2016 novel, The Truman Prophecy. Immediately upon waking from each of the sleep sessions, I felt an incredible release of energy, as well. I have a ‘muse,’ Robingale, who lives in the Free State (NH). We chatted shortly after the third dream and she helped me to grasp much more fully what they all mean. I’ll provide a paragraph on that below.

Here’s the text of the dreams and thoughts directly induced and written down:

Dream #1: 9/17/17 ~0500-0600

Conference on 9/11 in a major hotel venue—may already be happening via C. [Cynthia] McKinney, et al—everything is professional, good security, all respectful, MUCH REAL TRUTH!

I have a booth on First Principles Grand Jury for Justice 9/11 and justice in general. [The rest of this is not the dream, rather thoughts immediately induced by the dream and written down.] Idea for a book… “…Shall Empanel…” and I need to get with Peter Konetchy to read sources, develop plan. Continue reading →