Guest Column: The Bad Guys Won Again

So now what?
By Shane Trejo (excerpted from The Detroit Constitutionalist)

BanzaiLast week’s election results are being openly celebrated by some misguided conservatives. The partisan cheerleaders are excited and gloating because the Red Team prevailed. This is supposedly going to lead to a profound shift in the direction of the country, according to these people. While it was certainly fun to watch Obama and his stooges take it on the chin, the people who got elected are unfortunately not much of an improvement. By and large, it wasn’t the tea party wing of the party that succeeded on Nov. 4. Instead, it was by-and-large the establishment hacks that were funded by the same corrupt interests that tried to unseat Justin Amash gaining the seats of power. Continue reading

Brian’s Column: The 2008 Attempted Lynching of Kelly Tilghman

by Al Sharpton and the Media PC Slime Machine

KellyHey sounds like a rock group, eh?

This column is resurrected from the Coffee Coaster archive of January 2008, and is doubly pertinent for a more recent instance of successful media lynching of (now former) PGA of America president Ted Bishop. Oh what a tangled web we weave at the Golf Channel, where on the Ted Bishop lynching, commentators were largely silent with their eyes cast down—Ms. Tilghman seemed the most subdued—nobody bold enough in the journalistic cojones department to state the inconsistency of letting the ‘sexist’ Bishop be lynched in silence while objecting vociferously to hanging the ‘racist’ Tilghman. 

Continue reading

Book Review: The Appeal (2008)

A novel by John Grisham

AppealMr. Grisham is a big time writer and when you read this book on what happens when the corporate power buys justice, you’ll appreciate more why. Nobody can produce the authenticity of life at the top (how the 1% live: executive boardroom machinations; posh parties; help from sleazeball US senators; billionaire stock manipulation; and making clean, ever so stylish getaways in luxury automobiles, fast jets, and oceangoing yachts) and life among the long-suffering people without access to privilege (the most unfortunate of the 99% who are continually injured and killed by corporate criminals) better than Grisham.

The previous time I started a Grisham legal-beagle story, I remarked to myself haughtily, “My gosh, he’s writing this book as if it were already a screenplay, to facilitate tapping into the big money of Hollywood. How gauche.” Well, I forgot the name of the book I then suspended reading. Continue reading

Movie Review: Walkabout (1971)

Unusual movie that will have you wondering about the essence of things

WalkaboutGirl: Water. Drink. We want water to drink. You must understand! Anyone can understand that. We want to drink. I can’t make it any simpler. Water. To drink. The water hole has dried up. Where do they keep the water?

Believe me, this low-budget, early 1970s subtle cause-oriented art film is unlike any you will ever see. Unique in so many ways: a) for painting an unromanticized, existential-angst picture of white Australia, b) for showing the connection/disconnection between a colonizing civilization and the indigenous culture displaced by that civilization, and c) for plumbing the elemental depths of how man and woman survive in nature. If I had to pick a genre for the film, I’d call it a combination of environmentalist and native peoples’ epic, say, Jeremiah Johnson meets Dances with Wolves—to the accompaniment of Albert Camus reading his book, The Stranger. Continue reading

Guest Column: Another Fake Bin Laden Story

Another Fake Bin Laden Story

Full column here by Paul Craig Roberts

RobertsRT, one of my favorite news sources, has fallen for a fake story put out by the Pentagon to support the fantasy story that a SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden, who died a second time in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a decade after his first death from illness and disease. http://rt.com/usa/202895-navy-seal-shot-binladen/

This fake story together with the fake movie and the fake book by an alleged SEAL team member is the way the fake story of bin Laden’s murder is perpetrated. Bin Laden’s alleged demise at the hands of a SEAL team was a propaganda orchestration, the purpose of which was to give Obama a hero’s laurels and deep six Democratic talk of challenging his nomination for a second term. Continue reading

Brian’s Column: Media PC Machine Slimes Another Good Man

Ted Bishop of the Professional Golfers Assn. of America canned for misspeak…

1509136_449590868503251_861487614_aRecently, the (now former) president of the PGA, Mr. Ted Bishop, got caught up in an emotional and ill advised text message sequence to Mr. Ian Poulter, a member of the European and PGA tours. Bishop was viscerally objecting to comments Poulter had made in his book, No Limits, that were apparently derogatory to Hall of Fame golfer Nick Faldo. In his Twitter tweets—which go out for the world to see—Bishop likened Poulter’s negative statements about Faldo to being like what a little girl (“l’il girl”) would say. Whoops!

So basically Ted Bishop ‘stepped in it.’ To put it mildly. Continue reading

Book Review: Unstoppable Global Warming (2007)

by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery
… or ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love smokestacks up the ol’ wazoo.’

WarmingThe orthodox global warming theory (GW) holds that humans, by burning fossil fuels mainly for vehicular transport and power generation, are warming Earth’s surface and atmospheric temperatures through emissions of carbon dioxide (which reflects radiation energy back to earth).

Many supporters of GW further hold the corollary view that carbon-based warming is enough to imminently (within the 21st century) threaten human well being and needs to be reined in.

Al Gore’s book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and my favorite book on the issue so far, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, are among many popular works representing the orthodox GW position.  Two graphics of particular importance to this theory are the Keeling Curve and the so-called Hockey Stick graph from the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Continue reading