Movie Review: Tucker (1988)

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Brian Wright

The man and his dream

Preston Tucker: Isn’t that the idea? To build a better mouse trap?
Abe: Not if you’re a mouse!

This movie I kick myself for having missed when it came out 20 years ago, and it was only last week on HBO that I actually got the Tucker experience with both barrels. The two main ideas for me of this all-American Horatio Alger “rags-to-riches” story are:

Innovation in conflict with the stale old dead way of doing things (out of collective ignorance and blind obedience to authority)—call it the Pleasantville barrier—and
Man against the state, particularly the US state and its insidious methods of coercion working in harmony with cartel business interests—call it the Kleptocon barrier.

Without question, the ebullient, imaginative, brilliant, individualistic, hard working Preston Thomas Tucker is more deserving of the quintessential “American Hero” designation than anyone Ayn Rand ever imagined—from the iconoclastic/artistic (humorless) Howard Roark to the ethereal/scientific (humorless) John Galt. Or anyone else ever imagined for that matter. Preston Tucker had it all: a joie de vivre that made everyone around him want to sing for joy, a similarly eccentric loving family with hearts as big as Texas, the imagination of a precocious child, and the hard driving intelligence of a man who wills himself to be the best. Continue reading →

Guest Column: Autism Epidemic Continues

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Brian Wright

What the News Isn’t Saying About Vaccine-Autism Studies
by Sharyll Attkisson excerpt from her column 9/17/15

A new study this week found no link between vaccines and autism. It instantly made headlines on TV news and popular media everywhere. Many billed it as the final word, “once again,” disproving the notion that vaccines could have anything to do with autism.

What you didn’t learn on the news was that the study was from a consulting firm that lists major vaccine makers among its clients: The Lewin Group.

That potential conflict of interest was not disclosed in the paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine; the study authors simply declare “The Lewin Group operates with editorial independence.” Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Brian Wright

Reflections on John Adams and Tax Day (2008)

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? The remedy is to set them [the rulers] right as to the facts…. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

—Thomas Jefferson

The full quote from Mr. Jefferson can be found in a number of places on the Web, but be advised as you fire up your browser: Homeland Security will probably be looking over your shoulder. Strange how far we’ve gone down Tyranny Road without so much as a peep from the general nonlibertarian population—perhaps such lack of resistance is explained by another Jeffersonian passage:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Which, as we all know, is from the Declaration of Independence. Continue reading →

Book Review: John Adams

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Brian Wright

The founding father of founding fathers
by David McCullough
Review by Brian Wright

2001, Simon and Schuster, 656 pages

“But all the provisions that He [God] has made for the gratification of our senses… are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision that he has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.”
— diary of John Adams ca. 1756

John Adams (1735-1826) is probably the most underrated thinker and actor participating in the birth of our nation, the birth of practical liberty (for society at large for the first time in history). The simple truth: were it not for Adam’s fierce determination and hard intellectual work of persuasion at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, 1776, independence from England would not have been declared, much less achieved. Continue reading →

Movie Review: John Adams (Book ref. HBO Series)

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Brian Wright

The founding father of founding fathers
by David McCullough
Review by Brian Wright

2001, Simon and Schuster, 656 pages

Guest Column: Independents’ Day

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Brian Wright

2016-11-08, Novi, Michigan. [Excerpt from the upcoming The Truman Prophecy.]

Fanfare!

Despite the massive parade-style, police-state presence, traffic lanes were fully cleared by local authorities and the Snyder Complex gates opened for parking at 0800 sharp. Long lines of cars queued for entry from east and west along Grand River Avenue. [Picture the ‘If you build it, they will come’ scene in the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, only in the morning and in a suburb of Detroit.]

Billed as the Kickoff of the Next Stage [of human evolution]—and because so many wanted to show up in person on a BIG stage for this cosmos-rending Independents’ Day ‘portal’—attendance for ‘official’ Snowden-Manning (S-M) stadium-rally-style events had to be modulated by price. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Dead Horse, New Horse?

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Brian Wright

4Q 2015, Michigan. [Excerpt draft from upcoming The Truman Prophecy.]

And it came to pass in the SLOW (Spartan Land of the Wolverine) and in most other subrealms of the LOWDOWN—to be uttered in a deep Darth Vader-like voice—(Land of Worship for Deathstar Operations Worldwide No-Exceptions) that a onetime major—albeit never conventionally successful—movement for freedom sputtered to a halt. That ultimately petering-out political enterprise would be the Libertarian Party of Michigan (LPM) and Libertarian Party (LP) in general.

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. [Good manners, consideration] … and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as ’empty,’ ‘meaningless,’ or ‘dishonest,’ and scorn to use them. No matter how ‘pure’ their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
— Sayings of Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein Continue reading →