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: Grand Prix (1966)

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Brian Wright

Movie, on DVD since 2006, conveys the general worldly ambitions of the times
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Review originally posted, July 2007.

When this movie came to the big screen it came to the BIG SCREEN. In 1966 I’m 17 and easily excited by fast cars in exotic places with beautiful people, so Grand Prix filled the bill for my viewing pleasure in every way. Didn’t know anything about acting or directing, what it takes to put a movie together, and I knew precious little about racing. But I recall hearing raves on the movie’s incredible authenticity of Formula One racing as it was carried out in those days.

Like, say, The Titanic or Star Wars, Grand Prix needed and needs to be seen on the big screen with all the technical wizardry that widescreen visuals and multiphonic sound provide. When I first gazed up at the opening credits where the projector generates successive screen splits of various mechanical images of the cars, all with the roaring and revving of highly tuned engines, I was hooked.

It didn’t really matter that the plot was a little weak off the track (though thoroughly believable by modern soap opera standards). The motivations were clear enough and in retrospect I see so many real persons I know in the boiled-down characters… for example, my sister is (was) a dead ringer for the Jessica Walter character and I’m convinced the Eva Marie Saint part was written for my S.O. (significant other). Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Life on the Less Unreal Side

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Brian Wright

7. Baseball and neighbors and Cubs, oh my!
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 6]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

No doubt subconsciously I viewed my entry into the forced socialization program of government schooling as an anomaly, something im- posed on me by higher authority that down deep I resented and never treated seriously. In a word, unreal. [Keep in mind that in the 1950s, the states still held ultimate authority over our culture’s compulsory children’s (prison) schools; the federal Mob didn’t really didn’t start stirring the forced-schooling cauldron—mainly on policy and funding—until the 1960s, with LBJ’s Great Society great overreach.][1]

The above-right photo shows my first- or second-grade era baseball team, managed by my dad and sponsored by the Overland Park Lutheran Church (OPLC). I’m in the back row on the far right. I became hooked on baseball from the glowing first day Dad took us to Kansas City Municipal Stadium to watch the perennially cellar-dwelling Kansas City Athletics of the American League. [The A’s would alternate with the Washington Senators between eighth place and seventh place. But it was still the ‘Show,’ the major leagues of baseball.] The sights, sounds, smells, tastes… watching these giants throw the ball so fast around the horn, hit it so hard. More like gods than men—at play on hallowed ground. Going to the ball park was my first spiritual experience, a church far more moving/reverential than the one in town that my parents had signed us up for. From the age of 5 to 15 I knew what I was going to be when I grew up: a ballplayer. Continue reading →

Book Review: Against Our Better Judgment

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Brian Wright

How the US was used to create Israel
by Alison Weir

This marvelous little book came my way via a major Detroit-area 9/11 truth activist, Dick Kennedy, who has also kept me up to speed on other serious research by reputable, established journalists and writers on Israel’s role in the global pathocracy. [Specifically, Dick referred me to the courageous book Solving 9/11: The deception that changed the world, by Christopher Bollyn.] From Bollyn and several other sources, no doubt exists whatsoever that top Israeli military and intelligence officials participated in the early planning, detailed preparations, and execution of the 9/11 attacks—including the coverup. Benjamin Netanyahu, current premier of Israel, even said it was a good thing for Israel that the 911 attacks occurred. (!)

Bollyn and now Ms. Weir provide abundant ammunition to show why good ol’ Ben would say such a thing: Israel does benefit from such acts of terrorism because the Zionist Israeli state—like its apparent US subordinate today—is a terrorist syndicate, and has been from the gitgo. It goes back to the beginnings of Zionism in the latter half of the 19th century, which had a central goal of establishing a Jewish state somewhere in the world. Led by a European journalist named Theodor Herzl, the movement coalesced in the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, and the World Zionist Organization.

Several other locations for the geographic artifice were considered—Argentina, Uganda, Cyprus, even Galveston Island in Texas—but the WZO eventually decided on Palestine… “even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 93-96% non-Jewish.” It was recognized by early Zionists that the United States would be a critical enabler of their objectives. At the advent of the 20th century the large majority of Jewish Americans were not Zionists, and many vigorously opposed Zionism for, among other reasons, being “a foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.” Continue reading →

Movie Review: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005)

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Brian Wright

An amazing experience that evokes all the love of life well lived

And for sure I’ll be checking out Brief Encounter, referenced there, to refresh my memory again of that classic love story. This quiet, small film is a gem one must not miss. In its short 108 minutes are contained the most deeply moving sensibilities available to the human spirit: loneliness, disappointments, irony, humor, friendship, love, and a kindness to strangers that blossoms into a many-splendored bouquet of mutual perception of the highest order. All from the simplest elements imaginable.

It’s about as mundane a plot as can be conceived: an elderly widow moves to London to live in a hotel (the Claremont), paying month to month, to be near her grandson—the mother, Mrs. Palfrey’s daughter, lives away in Scotland. The hope is that said grandson, at the very least, will be glad to know she’s arrived and perhaps pay her a visit or phone her from time to time. Also, she seeks more availability of community and people to know.

Mrs. Palfrey, exquisitely portrayed by Joan Plowright, soon gets to know her handful of fellow hotel residents and settles in to a routine not quite what she had hoped for. Until one day, while she’s out to mail a letter to her daughter and pick up a book for one of her new friends at the hotel, she suffers a minor accident. She’s tended to by a hopeful writer/ house-sitter, Lugo (Rupert Friend)—the young man reminds me of the Edward Albert character in Butterflies are Free. He’s the same age as her grandson… who hasn’t called in weeks; Lugo and Mrs. Palfrey become friends. I’ll let the reader work out some plot opportunities with that. Continue reading →

Guest Column: Details on the Major Issue Facing Us Today

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Brian Wright

Making Sense of the “Super Fuse” Scare
By The Saker via Paul Craig Roberts 5/11/2017 [Full original column]

For weeks now I have been getting panicked emails with readers asking me whether the USA had developed a special technology called “super fuses” which would make it possible for the USA to successfully pull-off a (preemptive) disarming first strike against Russia. Super-fuses were also mentioned in combination with an alleged lack by Russia of a functioning space-based infrared early warning system giving the Russians less time to react to a possible US nuclear attack.

While there is a factual basis to all this, the original report already mislead the reader with a shocking title “How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: The burst-height compensating super-fuze” and by offering several unsubstantiated conclusions. Furthermore, this original report was further discussed by many observers who simply lack the expertise to understand what the facts mentioned in the report really mean. Then the various sources started quoting each other and eventually this resulted in a completely baseless “super fuse scare”. Let’s try to make some sense of all this.

Understanding nuclear strikes and their targets

To understand what really has taken place I need to first define a couple of crucial terms:

Hard-target kill capability: this refers to the capability of a missile to destroy a strongly protected target such as a underground missile silo or a deeply buried command post.
Soft-target kill capability: the capability to destroy lightly or unprotected targets.
Counterforce strike: this refers to a strike aimed at the enemy’s military capabilities.
Countervalue strike: this refers to a strike on non-military assets such as cities.

Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Who ARE These People?

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Brian Wright

6. And what have they done with my brother!?
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 5]

First, I’m going to hit you with yet another Bro and me image, mainly because the age is right, probably the summer before kindergarten, and we’re at my mother’s mother’s farm near Centerville, Iowa. With the Mighty Wonder Dog named Tuton— named by our step-grandfather’s sons after the conventional two-ton pickup truck of the time. [I promise, this will be the final cute childhood picture of my brother and me. Well, okay, at most one or two more. 🙂 ] You can see my brother, Forrest, on the right, simply adored that dog. Tuton was a great one, too, he would run after any vehicle that came rolling down the dirt road in front of the farm house, barking and carrying on something fierce. But was as gentle and friendly a pet as you can imagine. Grown manly men cried buckets when Tuton died.

I’m introducing this episode with another brother photo, because one of the most serious crimes of force against me as a child—almost as heartless as taking me away from my parents—was separating me from my brother. In Episode 4, I allude to that assault, in particular:

“… my parents see no real alternative but to enter me in the compulsory government school system, the entry point euphemistically called kindergarten—literally, ‘children’s garden.’

“… ‘Who are these strange people wanting to tell me what to know, what to do, ringing bells, enforcing naps, tying my behavior to a group, regulating my movement into strict confines, watching me all the time, taking me away from my brother (confining me by age), putting this so-called ‘teacher’ adult in front who tells me to raise my hand and stay in my seat, and so on?!

“Who died and made them king? Was I asleep when they came by to ask for my approval? Where’s my brother? ‘If you don’t mind, Mrs. Bland, I’m going to be on my way, I know where the door is, thank you. I can walk home from there. My parents will call your parents. Have a nice day.’ Whhhooooshhh! out the door…. No such luck.” Continue reading →

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Brian Wright

Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By JD Vance, reviewed by Brian R. Wright

The reviews of Hillbilly Elegy have been almost universally positive, expressing an appreciation in particular of “the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions” (per Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One). We are speaking of the southeastern US ‘hillbillies,’ who come from Scots-Irish stock and are a major political-social grouping in America. Mr. Vance gives us a mem- orable down to earth rendering of a culture that is certainly relegated by the elites of the political class into facts and figures. He gives us a bird’s eye view, a gonzo journalistic, ‘you are there,’ day by day account of his own days of growing up from his Kentucky homeland and southern Ohio.

From the front jacket: Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of poor, white [mainly, Appalachian—ed.] Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over 40 years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.

Myself hailing from middle-class Overland Park, Kansas, then mainly the Detroit, Michigan, suburbs as I reached my 20s, I have known many people who ‘came from the south,’ to work in the automotive world and the more industrialized north. In fact, one of the people I most respect in the world was my first real boss, in the mid-1970s aerospace, Jim Cline, hailing from good ol’ boy Hickory, North Carolina. I can hear the drawl now. Vance writes of his kin: Continue reading →