Movie Review: A Christmas Story (1983)

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Brian Wright

“You’ll shoot your eye out.” (10/10)

A Christmas Story is becoming the It’s a Wonderful Life of the Baby Boomer generation… maybe more so for the Tweener Generation—a designation I just made up for folks born between, say, 1930 and 1946. The movie is especially meaningful for those who were boys in the context of a loving family where Pop worked, Mom kept house (and kept you out of trouble), and the Popsicle Index [1] was nearly 100%.

The year is somewhere around 1940—some reviews claim it’s the depression era, one says it’s 1940, some say it’s the 1940s in general, and it always looked to me something like 1949—in Hohman, Indiana, a mythical northern industrial city approximating Gary, Indiana. The movie is based on several narratives from Jean Shepherd’s book of reminiscences, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

Mr. Shepherd narrates the movie, which was filmed in the early 1980s in Toronto, with some downtown shots set in Cleveland. He’s Ralph Parker, a New York writer thinking back to the days when he was Ralphie, a nine-year-old everyboy growing up there in middle-class Indiana off the smokestack-laden southern shores of Lake Michigan with Mom (Melinda Dillon) and the Old Man (Darren McGavin) and his exasperatingly, though often funny, infantile five-year-old brother. Continue reading →

Guest Column: It’s Up to Us

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Brian Wright

More on what people were/are hoping to get from Donald Trump against all odds
by Paul Craig Roberts [original column here]

Did Donald Trump win the election because he is a racist and misogynist and so are the American people?

No. That’s BS from the Oligarchs’ well-paid whores in the media, “liberal progressive” activist groups, think tanks and universities.

Did Trump win because he stole the election?

More BS. The Oligarchs controlled the voting machines. They failed to steal the election, because the people outsmarted them and told the pollsters that they were voting for Hillary. This led to the presstitutes’ propaganda that Hillary was the certain winner, and the Oligarchs believed their own propaganda and didn’t believe it necessary to make certain of their victory.

Trump won the presidency because he spoke directly and truthfully to the American people, telling them what what they knew to be true and had never before heard from any politician:

“Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people. The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. Those who control the levers of power in Washington and the global special interests they partner with, don’t have your good in mind. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Where Can I Do the Most Good (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on November 27, 2016 by Brian Wright

Some ruminations on how panarchy can be made to work in the real world

In part 1 of this column I began from a local Republican convention where a couple of the customs—the invocation and gratuitous friendliness nod toward Israel—got me to thinking that there surely must be a better way for human beings to deal with their political needs (than to spend copious time working to elect public officials by majority vote, who then, together, exercise a comp- ulsory monopoly over providing an ever expanding range of services, whether you want these services or not). Unlike the normal marketplace, an individual cannot simply choose something else or opt out entirely. Again, the analogy to ordering breakfast is apt:

First of all, let’s assume that what I truly want for breakfast is on the menu. Go down to my local Kerby’s or Leo’s coney islands or regular coffee shop: virtually anything I want will be on the menu somewhere… and if it isn’t the owner will work with me, say, if I want salmon with my eggs. It may just cost a little more. Okay, then let’s contrast that with a system where if I want something, a majority of the patrons have to want that same thing before I can have it. Aliens in a space ship looking down at this kind of breakfast system would say to one another, “Boy, these humans are majorly retarded.”

Thus democratic politics in a coercive, compulsory government system means that in the neighborhood of zero persons get the government services they would freely choose, nor do they obtain the public officials (elected by ‘everyone’) they would prefer to provide these services. It’s all a bizarre, horrendously complicated and time-consuming process that no one in his right mind would spend a minute on, were it not for the fact that the actions of these officials can seriously eff up beyond recognition the lives of you and your loved ones. Continue reading →

Book Review: Three Men in a Room (2006)

Posted on November 25, 2016 by Brian Wright

New York politics a microcosm of ‘Borg‘ Central[1]
by Seymour P. Lachman
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Recommended by my local, esteemed Societism founder, Stephen Zimberg, Three Men in a Room documents a concrete reality to great effect: namely, the stark discovery that a mixed economy[2] concentrates and magnifies political power into fewer hands… to the extent it is ‘mixed,’ i.e. given coercive power over the voluntary choices of people in the economy.

It isn’t such a stark discovery for me, simply a new insight I had not yet considered. As a former true-blue Student of Objectivism (philosophy of Ayn Rand), I remember well the Objectivist analyses of the mixed economy, its mixture of freedom and statism (only, too many writers in that Randian world tended to confine statism to the actions of government officials in a vacuum; a government official acting for the benefit of the corporate-banksters was not considered statist). Continue reading →

Guest Column: Roots of the US-Israel Relationship

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Brian Wright

Israel and America: The Special Relationship that Isn’t
By Dr. Alan Sabrosky

Dr. Sabrosky, a US Marine and former director of the US Army War College, is one of the foremost analysts I’ve found on the Web who starkly states his conviction, with key evidence, that top Israeli-Zionist officials were the prime movers and architects of the 9/11 attacks. The following excerpt from Sabrosky’s 2013 column provides background over the past several decades of how Zionism and Israel became dominant political entities in—indeed, quasicolonial masters of—America… with very few Americans realizing it. — bw

Two outstanding, indispensable, and timely reference books on this subject:

Against Our Better Judgment: How the United States was used to create Israel, by Alison Weir.
Solving 9/11: The deception that changed the world, by Christopher Bollyn

Special Disclaimer Regarding ‘Antisemitism’

Antisemitism has come to mean anti-Jewishness. It is important to note that neither Dr. Sabrosky (who has Jewish ancestors), nor I, nor any of the millions of individuals (many of them Jews) who question or deplore actions of the state of Israel or political Zionism, that led to Israel’s creation, are anti-Jewish… any more than those of us who disapprove of the KKK are anti-Christian. — bw

Special Relationship

Whenever Israel’s supporters today speak of a “special relationship” with the US that is supposedly graven in stone, it is useful to remember that something very different existed when Israel came into existence in 1948 on the gutted carcass of Palestine. The US recognized Israel, but that was about it. Hollywood was (and remains) largely a Jewish preserve, but their level of influence elsewhere—in the government, the media and academia—was limited.

Prominent American Jews felt no obligation to endorse Israel or Israeli leaders, no matter what happened. Dozens (including Albert Einstein) signed a letter published in the New York Times in 1948 protesting the arrival of Menachem Begin and condemning his actions. And the general American public was largely indifferent to what happened in the Middle East. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Where Can I Do the Most Good? (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on November 20, 2016 by Brian Wright

Panic attack at a GOP county convention

Novi, Michigan. It came on suddenly, triggered I think by the invocation—in this WASPish crowd, always a nod to the Christian God—that meandered to an end by stating how we should always cherish our great friend, Israel. What?!

First—and I’ve felt this way about virtually all of the Republican meetings I’ve been to since becoming a precinct delegate roughly two years ago—what’s an invocation of faith in ‘God’ doing at a political meeting? This is America, where people’s religious beliefs are their own business so long as, “they neither break my bones or pick my pocket,” as our great sage and secular saint Thomas Jefferson put it.

Second, what is the state of Israel doing in a Christian invocation? Is the speaker trying to ward off accusations of excluding Jews? If so, why not say, let’s be nice to Jews… not let’s be nice to Israel? Then if we’re invoking kindness toward Jews, why not Muslims, Buddhists, humanists, and Great Pumpkinists? Which leads to the obvious conclusion that it’s best to dispense with religious observances in secular gatherings of this nature. If you want to solemnize the occasion, lead a moment of silence. Continue reading →

Book Review: And Nobody Died in Boston Either (2016)

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Brian Wright

State-sponsored terrorism with Hollywood special effects (9/10)
Edited by James Fetzer, PhD, and Mike Paleck
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Note: The Coffee Coaster is proud to publish this review on April 15, 2016—241 years after the British were ordered to march on Lexington and Concord, Mass., thus leading to, on April 19th, the first colonial armed resistance that produced British casualties: the ‘shot heard ’round the world’ and the beginning of American Independence. [And, ironically, the third anniversary of a major hoax-assault produced, in Boston, by an out-of-control, clandestine, federalized oligarchy for purposes of destroying all vestiges of individual liberty in our country.]

The good news is this book, unlike the notorious Nobody Died at Sandy Hook (2015), was not ‘banned'[1] by Amazon. The bad news is that with the Boston stage performance, many in the alternative community—which initially was all over the false-flag indicators and images in real time that completely demolished the official story—seemed to stop writing and caring a month later. Was it because the two alleged terrorists had hard-to-spell names and a Muslim orientation? Did the government’s case miraculously start making sense? Or did higher priority stories come along, e.g. what ‘the Donald’ ate for breakfast yesterday morning?

In any case, both Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the ‘Brothers Chechen,’ became the ‘it’ victims of the ultimate synthetic-terror tag game—this one apparently designed to groom American TV-Nation booboisie for martial law and 24/7 law enforcement pounding-slash-photo ops. “USA, USA, USA!” greeted the rampaging goons… large numbers of them, too… 9,000 men, armed and dangerous, sources report. “Sleep safe tonight, America, your steroid-amped, federalized, militarized police are here to throw you and your family out in the street.” Continue reading →