Category Archives: Whole Site

Book Review: Leaving the Sandbox (2014)

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Grand strategy for Libertarians in an era of wanton federal crimes and terror
by Brian Wright

Reposting this review on the eve of my 2018 campaign for state representative in Michigan. The LP is the vehicle upon which I’m seeking the office, but my mission is more fundamental: establishing a system in Michigan for First Principles grand juries via legis-lative act. My brochure lies here: http://brianrwright.com/BW38th.pdf. The book reviewed is about how the LP became controlled opposition and must change its stripes entirely. A bit dated now thanks to my First Principles GJ route, but still worthwhile ideas for the LP.  

FrontReviewed by the author.

Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism…

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.

— Aldous Huxley

Leaving the Sandbox is my book on grand strategy for the Libertarian Party, in particular,  and for the liberty movement in general (in terms of what can be done sans party to bring about a free society).

From the Foreword

The motive force of the Old Paradigm—a political-economic Western Cabal with immense and concentrated state power and material resources—is desperately trying to hang on to its Old World privileges. The average American feels this in the onrushing accouterments of the federalized, militarized police state, where citizens have all the rights the Occupying Government tells us we can have. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Casino Royale (2006)

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Casino Royale (2006)____7/10
Worthy heir to the Bond franchise

Directed by Martin Campbell

Selected Cast
Daniel Craig … James Bond
Judi Dench … M
Eva Green … Vesper Lynd
Giancarlo Giannini … Mathis
Mads Mikkelsen …. Le Chiffre

Casino Royale with the new James Bond (Daniel Craig) starts with an exhilarating chase scene in an African-port construction site.  Bond and his prey dance about the cranes and building columns like Spidermen or the swordsfolk of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

If you’re afraid of heights, you may want to avoid these first full 15 minutes of death-defying jumps and rumbles on high steel.  The camera pans out over the ocean with these tiny men in the foreground shinnying up greasy cables, surrounded by empty space. I felt twinges of vertigo combined with fear of falling.

Craig is the most physical Bond we’ve seen, and the most capable of tough-man-competition-like violence.

You wonder if the new Bond is simply a glorified killing machine, until we get into the actual plot with a beautiful associate Vesper Lynd (Eva Braun) winning his affection. Continue reading →

Guest Column: We Owe it to Everybody

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America’s massive debts make true recovery impossible
by writing for Bob Livingston Alerts

Link to original here.
There is a classic denial tactic that many people use when confronted with negative facts about a subject they have a personal attachment to.  I would call it “deferral denial” — a psychological postponing of reality.

For example, point out the fundamentals on the U.S. economy such as the fact that unemployment is not below 4 percent but actually closer to 20 percent when you factor in U-6 measurements including the record 96 million people not counted because they have run out of unemployment benefits. Or point out that true consumer inflation in the U.S. is not around 3 percent as the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims, but closer to 10 percent according to the way CPI used to be calculated before the government rigged the numbers.  For a large part of the public including a lot of economic analysts, there is perhaps a momentary acceptance of the danger, but then an immediate deferral — “Well, maybe things will get worse down the road, 10 or 20 years from now, but it’s not that bad today…”

This is cognitive dissonance at its finest. The economy is in steep decline now, but the mind in denial says “it could be worse,” and this is how you get entire populations caught completely off guard by a financial crash. They could have easily seen the signs, but they desperately wanted to believe that all bad things happen in some illusory future, not today. Continue reading →

Donut Whole: My Michigan State Rep Campaign, Position Paper #1: Vaccines

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Vaccines: A Cautionary, Rights-Based Approach
By Brian R. Wright

A ‘retired’ BSME engineer, I’m a part-time driver/medical technician for a company that provides a mobile swallow-test service to patients at rehabilitation facilities. Our team consists of a driver tech, a physician, and a speech pathologist to conduct the studies. Two of our young speech paths are pregnant with their firsts. With the autism epidemic in full swing (CDC: 1 in 36 kids) and childhood developmental disorders at an all time high (CDC: 1 in 6 kids) .AND. the CDC PROVING THAT A MAJOR VACCINE ON ITS SCHEDULE, THE MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), CAUSES AUTISM, I’m in a quandary…

Note: CDC stands for the federal government’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (under the Health and Human Services department). THE official top government. banana for research and public policy of the healthcare industry.

Big Pharma, who pays $billions to doctors, media, and politicians, is squelching any precautionary information about vaccines that mothers and families need to make informed choices. Thus the general public—not to mention most healthcare workers—still react to any questioning of vaccines as if you’re blowing your nose on the curtains of civilization.[1] Yet facts are facts: 100s of thousands of people, mainly children, are maimed or killed worldwide by these ballyhooed sacred cows year after year.

I very much like my speech paths and do NOT want them, their husbands, or their offspring to suffer the horrific downside of Vaccine Roulette… I feel it my humanitarian duty to warn them of the hazards despite expecting that any such appeal will be rejected with an inner shriek you can hear across Lake Michigan. What’s a fellow to do? I got it: kill two birds with one stone and write an open letter to serve as my position paper on the subject for my 2018 Libertarian candidacy for 38th district Michigan state representative. [I address both in a singular pseudonym.] Continue reading →

Book Review: The Longest Walk (2015)

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“My epic trek from tip to tip of the Americas” (1977-1983), Author’s Edition
by George Meegan, Free Man Publishing Company, 2015

TLWSure there’s a lot of background to the ultimate edition of a sleeper book that I expect will fire the popular imagination of large numbers of youth of the world who still read… in no time at all. George Meegan is a one-of-a-kinder, who grew up from nothing in jolly ol’ England, dreamed of being an adventurer, dropped out of school to join the British merchant marine, then decided one day he would walk the Americas from South to North. And did.

This account doesn’t have any counterpart in the literature of the ages: it’s at once a journal and also an ever-morphing flow of humanity through the window of an intrepid Englishman’s eyes and shoes (twelve pair, 19,019 miles). It’s an indescribable delight to join with this work as its final editor, to appreciate the original writing, of course, yet also the fine editing work performed by exceptionally caring individuals at Dodd, Mead, and Company before it succumbed to death by the conglomerates—here’s the kicker, Dodd, Mead went belly up just as Longest Walk the First is about to go to press! Continue reading →

Movie Review: Advise and Consent (1962)

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High-level fictional, US national politics intrigue
based on the book by Allen Drury

AdviseThis movie, though a worthy dramatic statement, will hit you mainly on levels of culture shock. It’s about the advise and consent of the US Senate to the appointment of a Secretary of State. The candidate is played by Henry Fonda, and despite the movie jacket suggesting his pivotal role, the actual candidate in the story is truly a secondary or tertiary character.

What I’m suggesting at the cultural level is how politics in Washington DC has changed between the early 1960s and the present day. Most striking to me is the relative power US senators carry between then and now. And I can express that difference in a single opening sequence of scenes: the majority leader of the Senate takes a taxi (hailed by the doorman) from his apartment complex to get to his office near the Capitol… and then rides to the chambers on what look like old Cushman electric golf carts.

They may still have some sort of shuttle carts, but I bet they sure don’t look like something a coolie would haul around town. Continue reading →

Guest Column: Ron Paul on the Syria Bombing

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Trump’s Disastrous Syria Attack
By Ron Paul [Full column here.]

Over the weekend, President Trump celebrated firing more than 100 missiles into Syria by Tweeting, “Mission Accomplished!” They say if you cannot learn from history you are condemned to repeat it. So I guess we are repeating it.

We all remember that “Mission Accomplished” was the banner behind then-President Bush as he gloated aboard a US navy ship that the war in Iraq had been won. After his “victory,” however, some 4,000 US military personnel were killed, perhaps a million Iraqis were killed, and the country’s infrastructure and social fabric were so badly destroyed that they probably can never be repaired.

Actually, there is much about the US attack on Syria that reminds us of Iraq.

Continue reading →