Movie Review: The International (2009)

Like a Bourne movie only with too much “reality”

The InternationalUmberto Calvini: [In explaining the “true” nature of banking in the world] The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn’t to control the conflict, it’s to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry, to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt.

Written by Eric Singer
Directed by Tom Tykwer

Clive Owen … Louis Salinger
Naomi Watts … Eleanor Whitman
Armin Mueller-Stahl … Wilhelm Wexler
Ulrich Thomsen … Jonas Skarssen
Brian F. O’Byrne … The Consultant
Michel Voletti … Viktor Haas Continue reading

Guest Column: Prop 1 as an Insult to Intelligence

Be nice to your grandmother by raising her taxes
by John Worster

Granny_LetterHey Brian. Sorry I have been off the grid lately. Survival has been tough recently and I have found the depression of both jobs keeping me in a catatonic recluse state. However,I had to open the curtains to share this with you. Continue reading

Brian’s Column: The Doreen Freedom Files

Ongoing efforts to free Doreen Hendrickson from the clutches of Leviathan

TaxToonToday I want lay out a set of documents and activities that Pete and many others in the educated tax and general liberty movements are putting together. We earnestly hope they do the job, that is lead to the exoneration and liberation of Doreen Hendrickson from the recent sentence of a malevolent prosecutocracy that is running amok nationwide. First the appeal is in progress. Second the attorney has sent a motion to the district court to modify Doreen’s sentencing on exclusively 5th Amendment grounds, which I’ve uploaded here. Third, led by Pete, we have been constructing a petition for submittal to high Michigan officials—chiefly the head law enforcement official in Michigan, Attorney General Bill Schuette; this will be accompanied by a background description, which Pete has composed and is uploaded here. And fourth, individuals are sending their own letters of appeal to Michigan officials to interpose on Constitutional grounds, such as the missive by former Troy mayor, Janice Daniels, which I’ve uploaded here. Continue reading

Book Review: The God Delusion (2006)

by Richard Dawkins
2006, Houghton Mifflin Co., 374 pgs.

DawkinsDawkins is a celebrated evolutionary biologist who, along with Sam Harris (The End of Faith), has emerged as one of the better known proponents of atheism in contemporary literature.  Both books have been New York Times best sellers.

In my own work, New Pilgrim Chronicles, I have likewise argued for the critical need of the species to evolve from faith to reason:

“Faith, as the antithesis of reason, is a barbarous relic that must be discarded if civilization, much less any prospect for freedom, is to emerge.”— from Chapter 5

Dawkins’ main thesis is the natural world and even sentient beings such as ourselves are accounted for by natural explanations. Thus, God is not a requirement for and has a vanishingly small probability of existence. Continue reading

Movie Review: Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)

Lush tribute to the soul (and body) of New Orleans

Love Song for Bobby LongLawson Pines: Some people reach a place in time where they’ve gone as far as they can. A place where wives and jobs collide with desire. That which is unknowable and those who remain out of sight. See what it is invisible and you will see what to write. That’s how Bobby used to put it. It was the invisible people he wanted to live with. The ones that we walk past everyday, the ones we sometimes become. The ones in books who live only in someone’s mind’s eye. He was a man who was destined to go through life and not around it. A man who was sure the shortest path to Heaven was straight through Hell. But the truth of his handicap lay only in a mind both exalted and crippled by too many stories and the path he chose to become one. Bobby Long’s tragic flaw was his romance with all that he saw. And I guess if people want to believe in some form of justice, then Bobby Long got his for a song. Continue reading

Guest Column: The Doreen Hendrickson Statement

… on the occasion of her sentencing (formally called an allocution)
Full statement on the losthorizons.com site here

Editor’s note: I attended the sentencing hearing, and like the trial, it was one of the most outrageously contemptuous acts toward anything decent or human that I’ve seen any pack of public officials take part in. Nor have I led a particularly sheltered life. The fix was in, the federal mob bosses had handed down their orders to their nonentity enforcer-drones in justice and on the bench: “we’re going after women now, next month it will be children and invalids.” Doreen was in the crosshairs.

Well, we’ll see about that.

Hell’s a poppin’ out here in real people land: we have an appeal in progress, a major Pontiac Tribune video in the works, and are going to pressure Michigan public officials to do their jobs to interpose on behalf of protecting the Constitutional liberty of one Michigan’s premier leading ladies… and thus the rest of us who live in the Wolverine State. But tonight I simply want to present key excerpts from Doreen’s allocution; from her lips to God’s ears.

Stand up and cheer, then circulate EVERYWHERE. Go to the original page and respond to the call to action.— bw. Continue reading

A Convenient Truth: Cracking the Code

After the unconscionable attack on Doreen, now more than ever…

CtCJust as a preliminary announcement, the author of the liberating, watershed book—that removes forever the burden of federal ‘income’ taxes on all Americans’ direct earnings—has suffered one of the most horrific attacks by a pack of renegade, law-debasing hoodlums in the so-called federal justice system: they pounced upon his dear wife, Doreen, for refusing to commit perjury on federal judge Nancy Edmunds’ unlawful order. It took two sham trials (a hung jury in the first one) for judge Victoria Roberts and her DOJ prosecution tag-team to mis- instruct and browbeat a cowed jury into a wholly ambiguous conviction in August last year. Then on Thursday, April 9, this week, Roberts sentenced Doreen to 18 months in federal prison. Doreen has 60 days to self-surrender, but only 30 days in the event she continues to refuse the unlawful judicial order to falsify her sworn tax statements. Continue reading