Movie Review: Coming Home (1978)

The best all-round antiwar love story of all time (10/10)

Reposted October 11, 2017. Not much has changed. Only now war for most Americans is a bunch of fat cowards sitting in a room murdering women and children with drones. Don’t even need to suit up, just watch TV and push buttons.

Coming HomeLuke Martin (Jon Voight): [Luke’s speech is spliced with final scene of Capt. Bob Hyde where he is at the beach] You know, you want to be a part of it, patriotic, go out and get your licks in for the U.S. of A. And when you get over there, it’s a totally different situation. I mean, you grow up real quick. Because all you’re seeing is, um, a lot of death. And I know some of you guys are going to look at the uniformed man and you’re going to remember all the films and you’re going to think about the glory of other wars and think about some vague patriotic feeling and go off and fight this turkey too. And I’m telling you it ain’t like it’s in the movies. That’s all I want to tell you, because I didn’t have a choice. When I was your age, all I got was some guy standing up like that, man, giving me a lot of bullshit, man, which I caught. I was really in good shape then, man. I was captain of the football team. And I wanted to be a war hero, man, I wanted to go out and kill for my country. And now, I’m here to tell you that I have killed for my country or whatever. And I don’t feel good about it. Because there’s not enough reason, man, to feel a person die in your hands or to see your best buddy get blown away. I’m here to tell you, it’s a lousy thing, man. I don’t see any reason for it. And there’s a lot of shit that I did over there that I [forced with tears] find fucking hard to live with. And I don’t want to see people like you, man, coming back and having to face the rest of your lives with that kind of shit. It’s as simple as that. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m a lot fucking smarter now than when I went. And I’m just telling you that there’s a choice to be made here.

Novel by Nancy Dowd
Screenplay by Robert C. Jones
Directed by Hal Ashby

Jane Fonda … Sally Hyde
Jon Voight … Luke Martin
Bruce Dern … Capt. Bob Hyde
Penelope Milford … Vi Munson
Robert Carradine … Bill Munson
Robert Ginty … Sgt. Dink Mobley

Continue reading

Guest Column: Las Vegas ‘Final’ Comment

Keeping our eyes on the high priority threats
By Paul Craig Roberts [Full original column.]

Dear Readers, some of you keep pushing me for an explanation of the Las Vegas event. I have no contacts with people who might be involved in US covert operations. Some of you think that since I “was there with Reagan,” I know everything about what goes on in government. This is not the case for anyone in government.

Those of you who are so interested in Las Vegas must figure it out on your own. Keep in mind that there can be just as much fake news on the Internet as on CNN, etc.

I can offer some guidance as to the sort of things you could examine to help you to come to a conclusion. Unless normal police investigation was not undertaken, there will be crime scene photos that should show blood trails and blood pools. The kill area should coordinate with the alleged position of the shooter. Bullets that entered the ground should show the trajectory and direction that the bullet traveled.

If none of this evidence is available, turn to the available evidence. Do the videos of the people crouching and running show any one who is hit? Do you hear voices crying out, “I’ve been hit, help me!”? If not, why not? 573 casualties is a large number. Continue reading

Brian’s Column: Las Vegas: Grand Juries to the Rescue

Prevent Las Vegas Type Mass Casualty Incidents by Indicting Public Officials
by Brian R. Wright

My sense is that it was a hybrid false flag with real victims and fake ones, as Robert David Steele suggests: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=RDsajRt2RLs.

Steele hadn’t seen the blood photos initially, but after he did, he changed his mind about whether there were casualties. Many had real wounds, many dead bodies, not the responses of crisis actors. Very different reactions from say, Boston Marathon, Sandy Hook. More like Orlando—suspected by many serious analysts to be a hybrid incident—though Orlando seemed predominantly staged, where it appears Vegas was predominantly real. Though we really can’t say that with any confidence, because we just don’t know at this point… Vegas may very well have been predominantly faked.

He believes that a non-USG rogue actor, probably Israeli Mossad, hijacked a FEMA fake mass casualty incident and murdered and mangled many civilians. As an act of war against the US, also serving the global security state corporate interests a la Zionist monsters Chertoff and Adelson: https://needtoknow.news/2017/10/4-weeks-ago-internet-post-warned-makers-security-scanners-planning-event-las-vegas-create-market-machines-hotels/

The exact point of hybrids is to have actual casualties and thus, as a trap, to make, by associating with the ‘zero-deaths’ claim, all those who question the official story into uncaring boobs (by associating them with zero-death claimants) who can be easily dismissed as CTs. Continue reading

Book Review: The Content of Our Character (1990)

A new vision of race in America (1990)
by Shelby Steele
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Harper Perennial, 175 pages

Reposted for timeliness… from my original review in September 2012. — bw

“Moral power precludes racial power by denouncing race as a means to power. Now suddenly the [black power] movement itself was using race as a means to power and thereby affirming that very union of race and power it was born to redress. In the end, black power can claim no higher moral standing than white power.”
— Page 19

Shelby Steele’s unique book, The Content of our Character, arose from various essays he had written for such prestigious publications as Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, Commentary, the Washington Post, and American Scholar.  Character is essentially an anthology of these groundbreaking articles, and argues a central thesis more or less condensed in the above quotation from page 19.  It is remarkable that Steele’s stimulating and controversial book was published nearly two decades ago… and that few black intellectuals of stature— including Steele himself—have built on his startlingly ameliorative infrastructure of ideas.

What happened?  Why did the intelligentsia—black, white, or magenta—drop the ball so glaringly?  It’s as if Michael Jordan, through superhuman athleticism, scored 30 points in the first quarter of a title game against the Lakers, then for the remaining three quarters the whole team went to sleep.  I have my own ideas, though of course I cannot speak for the motives and life situation of Dr. Steele, a professor of English at San Jose State University in California. Continue reading

Movie Review: Lion of the Desert (1981)

An unforgettable, sooo relevant, heroic movie…
that few people have even HEARD of ___ 10/10

Review by Brian R. Wright

lion_desertOmar Mukhtar: We do not kill prisoners.
Arab Warrior: They do it to us.
Omar Mukhtar: They are not our ‘teachers.’

Omar Mukhtar (to General Rodolfo Graziani): You have not one minute of right. Soon you will take everything from me and you want me to justify your thefts. No nation has the right to occupy another.

Omar Mukhtar: We will never surrender. We win or we die. You’ll have the next generation to fight and after that, the next. As for me, I will live longer than my hangman.

Directed by Moustapha Akkad
Written by David Butler, Paul Thompson

Anthony Quinn … Omar Mukhtar
Oliver Reed … Gen. Rodolfo Graziani
Irene Papas … Mabrouka
Raf Vallone … Colonel Diodiece
Rod Steiger … Benito Mussolini
John Gielgud … Sharif El Gariani
Andrew Keir … Salem
Gastone Moschin … Major Tomelli
Stefano Patrizi … Lt. Sandrini
Adolfo Lastretti … Colonel Sarsani

For this one-of-a-kind cinematic experience and for the review, I have Dean Hazel to thank. He’s been after me for a while to sling some ink at Lion of the Desert, and I’m terribly sad I hadn’t watched this 1981 movie many years ago. Why is this movie an ‘Essential?’ So many reasons. But in a nutshell, it treats Arabs as human beings while showing how the Italian fascist colonial power of the early 20th century committed a full-frontal holocaust—complete with concentration camps, torture, rape, terror bombing, and WMDs—on the indigenous people of Libya.[1] Continue reading

Guest Column: Las Vegas Shooting

It is almost like the story is being kept from us
By Paul Craig Roberts [Full original column here.]

Dear Readers, I appreciate the confidence that you show in me with your emails asking my opinion about the Las Vegas shooting. Many of you suspect that it is another false flag affair, and you ask me about its purpose.

I don’t know if it was a false flag attack, and if so, by who or for what purpose. I don’t expect to ever know. A story is set in place by officials and media. The only way to ever know is to personally investigate. You would have to go to Las Vegas, examine the scene, ask questions of the hotel, investigate the answers if you get any, find and interview concert attendees who were shot, attend funerals and see bodies of those killed, speak to their families, learn about the weapon allegedly used, experience trying to shoot at targets far below and far away, compare the number of casualties with the recorded time of firing, and so forth. In other words, we would have to do the job that in former times would have been done by the press, but no more.

It is almost like the story is being kept from us. For example, from media reports that the event was just across the street from the hotel, I did not know that “across the street” was a distance of 390 yards (1,170 feet).

As I don’t expect to ever have a confident opinion about what happened, I am not paying much attention to the mass shooting, or should I say alleged shooting. We are lied to and deceived so much that we can never tell when we are told the truth. It is like Dmitry Orlov says: Continue reading

Brian’s Column: Global Spring Special Announcement

Grand Strategy: First Principles’ Foundation and First Principles’ Grand Juries
By Brian R. Wright

It is with a spirit of melancholy, yet resolve, that I formally announce the founding of the organization, the First Principles’ Foundation, whose aim will be to elucidate and promote American First Principles and their logical activist corollary: formation and spearheading of PRIME (people’s restored independent multilevel everywhere) grand juries as described in these two columns and a brochure:

The Foundation’s initial Web presence is soon to come, with my vision-quest site, http://Global-Spring.org, serving as its umbrella, also covering the moral philosophy I’ve created, called Trumanism, and launch of the Independents’ movement.

So why the melancholy? Continue reading