Monthly Archives: February 2018

Movie Review: Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

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Understated Eastwood (anti)war movie

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by William Broyles Jr. and
Paul Haggis

Ryan Phillippe …. John “Doc” Bradley
Jesse Bradford …. Rene Gagnon
Adam Beach ….  Ira Hayes
John Benjamin Hickey …. Keyes Beech
John Slattery …. Bud Gerber
Barry Pepper …. Mike Strank
Jamie Bell …. Ralph “Iggy” Ignatowski
Paul Walker …. Hank Hansen
Robert Patrick …. Colonel Chandler Johnson

Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is a touching rendition of the lives of three men who raised the flag that became “the single [camera] shot that can end the war” in the early days of the Battle of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945.

Three of the six men who raised that flag, then survived the battle, were extracted from the campaign to become spokesmen for the government’s successful War Bonds’ appeals.  They were paraded around the country as bona fide war heroes, to their embarrassment (and in the case of American Indian Ira Hayes, into a downward spiral of alcoholic self-destruction).

This is magic cinema, whether you like the war authenticity—the movie is coproduced by Eastwood and Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan)—or the reminiscent romantic touches of Bridges of Madison County.  Depicting such reality of battle has the effect of a hundred antiwar marches.  And Eastwood, whose companion movie is Letters from Iwo Jima, has indicated in interviews he regards the movies as gritty testaments to the evil of war. Continue reading →

Guest Column: “The Conversation”

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The Newsroom Conversation That Will Change America
…once it can be made to take place.
by Pete Hendrickson [Original complete source here.]

Note: I have inserted my own CtC fact graphics in the text. The collection of these graphics for your own posts on Facebook or Tweets on Twitter is located here:
http://brianrwright.com/CtC_Graphics.zip. — brw

Note: Please read this column I have posted, American Heroine, and donate via the gofundme I have set up here at http://gofundme.com/DoreenRelief or directly to the Hendricksons as shown in the column.

THE ENERGETIC, AMBITIOUS YOUNG JOURNALIST hurries through the National News Desk Editor’s office door, and without even waiting to be recognized, blurts out his news:

“Chief, I’ve come across the story of a lifetime! There’s this guy in Michigan who does what might be called forensic legal research– historical background, fine-print parsing, untangling “legalese”, that sort of thing.”

The excited reporter plants his hands on the editor’s desk and leans in, eyes wide.

“The guy decided to focus on the income tax back around ’01, ’02. He ended up uncovering mind-bog-gling stuff, Chief!

“Ever since the guy published his findings in 2003, tens of thousands of people have been routinely paying ZERO in federal and state income tax, Social security tax, and Medicare tax every year. ZERO!! Instead, these people get complete refunds of everything they had paid in or had withheld from them!!”

The young man now looks as though he’s barely restraining himself from grabbing the editor’s lapels and pulling him in to continue nose-to-nose… Continue reading →

The Religion of FLOW (Starting Segment)

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FLOW (Fellowship for Liberation of Our World)
What I have in mind and why I’m launching this year
By Brian R. Wright

Note: I’m choosing to build this column as a description in stages. Please use this post for development reference only and go to the latest Religion of FLOW column here.— brw

Some recent instructive face time with one of my more insistent muses has caused me to realize that I need to ‘get on the stick,’ as my peers would tell me in high school. I couldn’t even answer her briefly as to what in fact FLOW was or is, much more why anyone would want to join up… or how she would benefit from it.

Recent dreams here, here, and here have provided some light along the path, then the reinvigoration of my Falun Dafa practice has supplied what heretofore had been missing for the breathing sacred being, i.e. you and me. I sketched what you see on the right in less than a couple of minutes while waiting to shower—it’s the initial FLOW chart, 🙂 so to speak, everything is anticipated there, just not positioned exactly where it will turn out.

Yes, I am building FLOW as a faith or religion with the same features of any of the Abra-hamic ones: Judaism, Christianity, Islam—although sans ‘God.’ Akin to Buddhism, except supporting the apotheosis of each individual’s independent consciousness and Being … in accordance with the laws of Nature and the sacred nonaggression principle. Also, like, say, Unitarianism, tho without any doors open for state worship or altruistic identity politics. Rational, spiritual, creative, and benevolent: Ayn Rand, Eckhart Tolle, Jon Rappoport, and Bagger Vance meet one another for a common purpose: each of our spiritual well being.

A religion has two general aspects: doctrine and practice. I’ll summarize each first, then expand with narrative to where I am now in the integration.

Twenty-Five Words: FLOW Doctrine

Just as flow in nature is enhanced by removing obstacles, FLOW leverages the cultivation practice of Falun Dafa to dispel barriers to independent conscious-ness, and fosters an individual’s inner peace, outer peace, and creative abundance.

Falun Dafa, briefly explained here in a flyer I composed for its DVD, is the missing link I was looking for to breathe life into the FLOW system, make the FLOW idea and prac-tice much more alive for people. [The ideas behind FLOW are vibrant, but they are, after all, mind constructs, which can become the tail of illusion wagging the dog of reality.]

Why Falun (wheel) Dafa (great law)? Because it’s a very simple set of exercises that integrates a focus on justice for the individual in society. Truth, Tolerance, Compassion: these are the pillars Falun Dafa wants its adherents to cultivate. The meditative practice is from Chinese antiquity, and was founded in modern form by Mr. Li Hongzhi in China near the time of the democracy protests there. It acquired 10s of millions of followers, and, on account of these followers protesting general mistreatment by the government, it became the target of a horrific Chinese government persecution that continues to this day.[1] = [1]

Significant philosophical thinking with individualist political foundations complement…

Twenty-Five Words: FLOW Practice

My main concept of FLOW and hence its orienting practice is to provide a haven and impetus for existing independently conscious human beings to seed, grow, and spread independent consciousness in themselves and throughout our species. All right, that’s 25. You see the main theme here, don’t you: a coalescence of (human) beings of independent consciousness…

Two sides to the word practice, one in the ethical conduct of one’s life according to FLOW and the other as in the organization or fellowship…

The Why and How

[to be continued in next week’s Brian’s Column]

[1] Please be aware that FLOW does encourage other healthful energy and healing practices—I’m particularly fond of the “Yoga for the West of Us” ways of David Scott Lynn, for instance—it’s just that Falun Dafa seems to match up perfectly for the FLOW mission.

Book Review: The Wandering Who? (2011)

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A study of Jewish Identity politics, by Gilad Atzmon
Perhaps the most significant book on the power metapolitics of our age
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

The Wandering Who? is one of those wholly extraordinary and intellectually sharp, even entertaining, missives in which readers will want to place a highlight on every other page. It is simply the most enlightening book you will read in the next decade or two about one of the most important subjects affecting the modern course of our species: the origin and rationale of “Jewish-ness” and its manifestations.

For roughly a decade, I’ve read a number of articles and books about and given thought to the puzzle. What is a Jew, fair and proper? Need I be concerned one way or the other? Friend or foe? Pro liberty or anti? Are Jews merely practitioners of a faith, a religion—if so, how does the fundamental doctrine square with humanitarian norms or my own secular Trumanism? Or are they, themselves, an ethnic identity, a ‘people’ who have generally been suppressed by conventional Christian society thru the ages? Or have they self-ostracized from surrounding culture, feeling chosen by God? Do they disdain, despise, and/or work to harness the non-Jew? Do they have an affinity for collectivism/communism? Further, how do we figure the genealogy? What percentage of  modern Jews, for example, descend, not from the Holy Land, rather from the Khazars of  the 8th Century? [Ref. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe (1976).]

Gilad Atzmon, perhaps the most unlikely of sources, yet a truly exceptional intellect, has laid all the answers bare… in terms that, well, a fairly conceptually oriented mind will find simple and straightforward. The material is not difficult, but does presuppose an interest in reading sparkling, independent scholarly treatises.

Since reading Alison Weir’s equally vital work on Zionism and Israel several years ago, Against Our Better Judgment: How the United States was used to create Israel, I have thought, along with Ms. Weir and many others, that the essential problem is that many Jews embrace the political philosophy/movement of Zionism and its resulting apartheid state of Israel. I still lean that way, but Atzmon suggests that these notions are facile, unrooted, or, at least, incomplete.

Continue reading →