Book Review: Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons (1992)

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Brian Wright

by Scott Adams

The cartoons of Scott Adams became popular in the downsizing decade of the 1990s. This particular book was originally published in 1992, and focuses much more on the cosmic sarcasm and interaction between Dilbert and his dog, Dogbert. Most people associate Dilbert with a coterie of office workers and the foibles of office life that many who have worked a white collar job back then identify with. [Some mistakenly think Dilbert was the inspiration for Office Space, but that movie was based on a character Milton created by Mike Judge.]

So how do you review a book of cartoons?

First, let’s ask about the general condition of political humor and satire these days. When I was a young adult, primetime in the 1970s newspaper cartoons were still in vogue. We had Peanuts, in Detroit Guindon was popular, I remember Cathy, Arlo and Janis, many others, then into the 1980s, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side by Gary Larson. And those are only off the top of my head, ones I tried to read regularly, real time. It was great. Then there was television talk-show humor, Johnny Carson, and cerebral ones like Dick Cavett, who often did political stuff. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Brian Wright

Great story, but hard to not think about the importance of family planning (7.5/10)

Jamal Malik: If it wasn’t for Ram or Allah, we’d still have a mother.

Actually, during my time at the theater, I don’t remember hearing that quote from the lead character. A fantastic statement. It points to a relatively graphic scene earlier in the movie where a bunch of slum men apparently of one superstitious conviction (Ram?) attack with sticks and fire bombs another bunch of poor people of a (presumed) different superstitious conviction (Allah?). Jamal’s mother is one of the victims.
It’s quite sad and senseless.

Jamal sits on the stage of a popular Indian “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” show; and remarkably he’s answering a series of multiple choice questions correctly. [Jamal comes from nowhere and the more he wins, the more the host of the show Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) and his henchmen try to “convince” Jamal that he’s cheating.] Through flashbacks ingeniously called up by the questions, we get the entire story of his 18-something life… how he grew up in the slums and worked his way into a job running tea for customer service telephone centers, and somehow was on the line when the show called. Continue reading →

Guest Column: What We KNOW about 9/11

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Brian Wright

From the article “911 Truth and Obama’s Birth”
by Mr. Miles Mathis (http://mileswmathis.com/strike.pdf)

Now let’s look at what we know (about 9/11):

We know a plane didn’t crash at the Pentagon.
We know someone ordered a military stand down, so that nothing was done on 911 to stop whatever it is that happened.
We know a plane didn’t crash at Shanksville.
We know the buildings in New York didn’t come down due to planes or fires. We saw with our own eyes that they exploded.
We know that WTC7 was pulled in a demolition.
We know that the residue of exotic explosives was found in the dust.
We know that WTC7 contained SEC documents, CIA offices, the mayor’s (Guiliani) emergency offices, IRS offices, Secret Service offices, Salomon Smith Barney’s main offices and documents, NAIC offices and documents (insurance regulators), and bank vaults that included the largest cache of Kennedy photos in existence.
We know that Larry Silverstein, who owned the leases on the buildings, OK’d the demolition {“pulling”) of WTC7, since he told us this himself, on TV.
We know that cellphone calls from the planes were faked.
We know that video of the planes going into the towers was faked.

Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Dorothy

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Brian Wright

Autumn 2015 thru Autumn 2016

From the folklore:
First, Toto pulls back the curtain.
Then Dorothy reads the riot act to the Wizard.

Toto = What is.
Dorothy = So what?

From the Prophecy:
Toto = the Truth Realization phase.
Dorothy = the phase of doing something about it.

In Toto, the heroes of our story—fulfillers of the Prophecy, leaders of ‘the Independents’ (aka Indies or I’s):

Expose the tools of deception
Show how to focus Truth to create more Indies

In Dorothy, the A-team snowballs the Grand Indie breakout along three parallel lines: Continue reading →

Book Review: God and Philosophy (1966)

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Brian Wright

An audit of the case for Christian theism
by Antony Flew

In the course of my own intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual development, the issue of the Christian god—or God, if you prefer (conceding the initial cap as a means of indicating its monotheistic nature)—has been central. Partly because I was raised to believe in God and then partly because my libertarian political convictions emerged so strongly during my late teens… and they revolved about the writings of Ayn Rand (a quintessential atheist). [You can read Nathaniel Branden’s short column in the May 1962 Objectivist newsletter, which I’ve uploaded here as a jpeg file, which gives perhaps the most concise demolition of the logic behind the concept of God, at least as a ‘first cause.’]

God and Philosophy was one of the key books that I read on the subject of theism vs. atheism in the early 70s. Along with the classic out-of-print tome by Homer W. Smith, Man and His Gods (1952)—and I had heard of George Smith’s The Case Against God a few years later, as well—G&P gave pretty much the whole picture of why the concept of God (AS DEFINED BY THE CONVENTION OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER) is a nonstarter. The parenthetical phrase is extremely important, it’s the definition of terms that is necessary before any fruitful argument or discussion can follow. So the standard definition of God that Flew stipulates is as follows: Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Brian Wright

Mexicans as people, oh my (9/10)

You want to understand the real meaning of immigration control? Then I suggest you check out this movie and watch it multiple times. A few weeks ago I reviewed The Visitor, an exquisite dramatic statement on the unique process the federal government (as any other leviathan-state) uses to crush citizens of Earth who happen to find themselves inside US boundaries with defective paperwork. In that Oscar-worthy movie, the unfortunate paper-deficient world citizen was from the Middle East. In Three Burials, our victim is a ‘border’-crosser from the south.

Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones

Tommy Lee Jones … Pete Perkins
Barry Pepper … Mike Norton
Julio Cedillo … Melquiades Estrada
Dwight Yoakam … Belmont
January Jones … Lou Ann Norton
Melissa Leo … Rachel
Irrfan Khan … Police Inspector
Saurabh Shukla … Sergeant Srinivas Continue reading →

Guest Column: How the Government Suppresses Free Energy Technology

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Brian Wright

We know bountiful energy alternatives exist, why not unleash them…
By ‘Buck Rogers’ excerpted from Activist Post

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if better and cleaner energy sources were widely available and affordable to all of earth’s people? If so, you’re not alone, as the quest for a better energy existence has been the focus of many ingenious inventors, scientists, experimenters and even corporate and government scientists for generations.

We know it’s possible, but for some reason, though, society just can’t seem to get beyond 23.6 or so miles per gallon on average, highway. The gap between what science is clearly capable of and what is available to the consumer mass market is extraordinary, and here really is no need to be using up the world’s fossil fuels and building nuclear plants as if there were no tomorrow, but we do. Continue reading →