Book Review: What about gods?

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Brian Wright

Children’s story on letting go of make-believe
by Chris Brockman
Review by Brian Wright

This marvelous little book came from a very special individual out of a milieu in the young libertarian movement in Michigan in the mid-1970s. There was a certain orthodoxy to that milieu; I remember Chris and his wife Julie seemed on the ‘free spirit’ end of the general ‘rational-libertarian’ structure of our sociology at the time.[1] Chris and Julie were always more antiwar and anticorporate than most of us in those days, and had solid secular-humanist credentials. We in the secular Objectivist-libertarian center had read and heard all the excellent intellectual refutations of the concept of God.[2] I, personally, manifested egoic arrogance in my understanding, to the point of minimizing more humane perspectives. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: He Who Has the Gold…

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Brian Wright

Golden Rule and its mechanics in Samland
by Brian Wright

It’s the old joke or phrase, I believe it was from the comic strip Pogo—but it may have been The Wizard of Id or Shoe (reader input welcome). One of the characters says in conversation about politics, “Just remember the Golden Rule.” “What do you mean?” “He who has the gold makes the rules.” This is so entirely apt when one discusses the central banking and money machinery of the United States: the Federal Reserve System (Fed).[1] For this week’s column I’m going to paraphrase Mr. G. Edward Griffin’s description, in The Creature from Jekyll Island, of how the Fed works, how it creates ‘money.’ Like turning lead into gold, the central bankers believe in magic… and would have us believe they’re Mandrake the Magician. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Robert Ettinger Takes a Nap

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Brian Wright

Cryonics founder begins his cold deep nap
by Brian Wright, w/comments by Pat Heller

Though we are not precisely contemporaries, Robert Ettinger—author of The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Superman, founder of the cryonics movement and the Cryonics Institute (CI)—and I inhabited the same milieu of SE Michigan in the days when liberty and life extension became primetime, iconic ideas in society (roughly the late 1960s and into the early 1980s).[1] Mr. Ettinger ‘deanimated’ a week ago at his home in Clinton Township, Michigan, where he was perfused and ‘frozen'[2] in a chamber of liquid nitrogen at the CI facility, also in Clinton Township. The Washington Post, and several other periodicals, mostly respectful, carried the story of his passing… passing from a state with heartbeat and respiration into essential biostasis.

So the leader of a great techno-philosophical movement takes his hoped-for temporary leave by practicing what he preaches: taking a prepared respite from life, until the time medical knowledge catches up to reanimate and rejuvenate him. That is the plan. The Wikipedia article on Robert Ettinger is accurate and, again, respectful, no doubt written by those with a personal knowledge of the man and the vastness of the ‘idea-prise’ he created.[3] Here are some comments from Pat Heller, one of the early adopters of cryonics, and a perennial officer of CI: Continue reading →

Human Interest: Free State Festivi 2010/11

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Brian Wright

Latest Pilgrim Chronicles from a renewed activist
by Brian Wright

Perhaps I should say ‘renewed though lagging a bit,’ because for the first time it’s hitting home that ol’ BW, libertarian man of the ’60s, is becoming a libertarian man in his 60s. Though the flesh is fading, the spirit soars… in line with my more political-level freedom-loving past… now with truly a personal spiritual revelation and transformation that stands to bring liberty to full fruition. Getting ahead of myself… Continue reading →

Book Review: Gravity Golf (1994)

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Brian Wright

The evolution and revolution of golf instruction
by David Lee

My golf experience is amateur and began relatively late in life, at the age of 44 in 1993. I’ve been a fairly decent athlete, lettering in baseball in high school as a pitcher. Both my parents have good hand-eye coordination, my dad was a pilot in WW2 and had exceptional psychomotor skills. When I was a kid, he played golf occasionally—and coached my little league baseball teams—and the one saying he repeated to me incessantly was, “More technique than muscle, son… never force things.”

David Lee is only five years my senior (4/1/44 and I was born in 1949), but his emphasis on technique over “violence,” as he calls it, makes David Lee seem like he’s offering up the eternal wisdom of my old man. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: FLOW

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Brian Wright

Fellowship for the Liberation of our World
by Brian Wright

Taking this opportunity to plug my new ‘religion’ and ‘church.’ It’s all in a special three-fold brochure entitled FLOW, which can be accessed as a PDF file at this location. I’m presenting at the 2011 Free State Project Porcfest in Lancaster, New Hampshire, on June 24. The title of my presentation there is Liberty as a Spiritual Practice: Practical Lessons and Urgent Opportunities of the Sacred Nonaggression Principle (SNaP). I’m taking this opportunity to make it my June 20 column, then I’ll probably be taking a Coffee Coaster vacation until after the festival. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: In Borg We Trust

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Brian Wright

Clearing the Barrier Cloud thru a good name
by Brian Wright

Yes, for my polite friends who resist the acknowledging the 900# Gorilla, here comes yet another column on noting and slaying the black beast. But it’s in a positive vein and I promise not to accuse you who deny the obvious—or at least readily apparent—of being immoral or stupid. In fact, the great majority of you are simply ‘tardy adopters:’ uncomfortable disagreeing with deep nationalistic conventions. Either that, or manifesting the archetypical American child-consciousness… as one writer puts it:

“We Americans are the ultimate innocents.
We are forever desperate to believe that this time
the government is telling us the truth.” Continue reading →