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]

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.}

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 →

Donut Whole: Hell is Coming for Breakfast

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Brian Wright

Are You Ready to Die?
By Paul Craig Roberts [Full original column posted here]

This column by PCR will perhaps go down in history as specifying the most crucial choice any of us faces regarding survival of the human species, as well as our ourselves. He is absolutely right that lunatics running the deep state of the United States have chosen a literally Satan-worshiping path that leads to imminent preemptive nuclear attack by the US against Russia and China or vice versa. PCR also notes that NO MAINSTREAM MEDIA OUT- LET HAS COVERED A SINGLE STORY showing that nuclear war is very likely months if not weeks away—NOT A SINGLE STORY! [Excuse me, one outlet, the Times Gazette of Ashland, Ohio, covered the statement by the Russian armed forces directorate official below that Russia has concluded that the United States intends a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia.]

Further—and this is my own observation—the minor premise of the syllogism[1] leads to the irrefutable conclusion that the Mainstream ‘Noise’ is of no value to humankind, and, in fact, is working to be instrumental in its annihilation. Ergo, everyone interested in human survival, and the truth about ANYTHING ELSE, needs to completely sever all Mainstream ‘Noise’ connections, ASAP! — Editor, brw

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“Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: If a fight is inevitable, you must strike first.” — Vladimir Putin

In George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, 1984, information that no longer is consistent with Big Brother’s explanations is chucked down the Memory Hole. In the real American dystopia in which we currently live, the information is never reported at all. Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Brian Wright

Insider look at harsh high world of fashion

On the face of it, you wouldn’t think a movie about the cutthroat, glamorous world of high fashion—specifically the relationship between the domineering editor of New York’s premier fashion magazine (Miranda Priestly played by Meryl Streep) and her second assistant, a standout journalism graduate from Northwestern (Andrea Sachs played by Anne Hathaway)—would appeal to “guys.” Devil has chick flick buttoned all over it.

But think again. It’s quite the treasure of a movie for all, particularly in the performance of Ms. Streep, who brings to life the boss in extremis we all love to hate. And truth be told, the movie is a mainly vehicle for displaying the essence of great acting. You can almost make the case, as with the Rachmaninoff 3d piano concerto or some Jack Nicholson movies, that the virtuoso performance is what makes the piece the piece.

The plot is derived from the popular book by Lauren Weisberger which was a New York Times best-seller for six months and published in 27 countries. Andrea (Andy) Sachs represents the author’s own struggles to “make it there” in New York; she seeks a journalism career via jobs that move her forward. She interviews with Miranda Priestly for a second-assistant job at Runway and, surprisingly, lands it. Continue reading →

Guest Column: Trump Fires Comey

Posted on May 8, 2017 by Brian Wright

Spin doctors go wild in the swamp
By Jon Rappoport [original column here]

In the political swamp that is Washington, and in the press swamp, motor boats began speeding every which way in the wake of Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Comey.

People in the boats are holding up signs to explain the reason for the firing.

The first sign was: COMEY LIED. Comey lied the other day. He lied in testimony before Congress, when he said Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long-time aide, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner, some of which contained classified information. The truth was, the FBI says, contradicting Comey, a great many of those emails were merely “backed up” on Weiner’s laptop via “backup devices.” Huh? Does that actually mean something? Weiner obtained those emails out of the sky, delivered by a chariot, and not from Huma? Weiner’s laptop was serving as a storage device, a personal little cloud? Somebody not connected to the Hillary campaign was using the social-media’s porn star as a backup for classified data? Who would that be? Putin? Putin hacked the Hillary/DNC emails, and sent them to both WikiLeaks and Anthony Weiner? “Hi Anthony. Vlad here. Keep these thousands of emails for posterity.” Continue reading →